Michael D'Arcy (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Mr. Murphy, on page six, half way down your opening statement you say on the third bullet pointon the second number of bullet points:

Pursued strategy of managing down commercial book: To aid this process, I employed a number of commercial property lending professionals, closed regional lending offices and improved controls by consolidating operations into a more centralised operation.

Could you just expand upon that, and I want to give you a little bit of background? Mr. Dan McLaughlin, former, or senior, economist with Bank of Ireland, stated clearly that it was the CRE sector that crashed the banks and had the impact that it did upon the Irish economy. Could you just outline what had happened prior to, or how the operation worked prior to you centralising the operation?