Mr. Michael O'Flynn:

I have always said that there's no question there was too much borrowing. There was a lot of borrowing for projects that could not work and I had lots of experience of looking at projects that couldn't work. I don't believe that the banking crisis ... that this was caused by developers. I think we certainly, the borrowings in the property sector were an issue but the developers that I would speak of are not ... are the full-time, professional developers, who have been at it, in my case 37 years now and lots of others like me. But, unfortunately, every single person became a developer of some sort or other. Not every single ... lots of people became developers. And all of us got lumped in together. This is what happened also in NAMA. Everybody was ... they didn't separate the professional from the amateur, or from the people who got into the business, people who had no skills in the area, people who had no history of doing ... or, actually not able to work the assets, so to speak. So I don't think it's a ... we've taken a fair amount of criticism as a grouping and I'm speaking for the full-time professional developers. A lot of that has actually been caused by the way NAMA decided to demonise us at the outset, which is an extraordinary thing to do when you're taking over all the loans of all these people, to be overcritical of them. But I think the banking crisis ... it was a global crisis. It was a euro problem. And I think had the banks been able to withstand the shock that other countries could, I don't think we would be having this discussion that ... we certainly had some contribution, but we didn't cause it.