Ms Fidelma Clarke:

Certainly, the society took, as I said, the findings very seriously. There ... in terms of the individual findings for individual cases, as I think I've mentioned and others have mentioned, in general they were able to be dealt with by return in terms of reviewing the loan files and providing an update on each case or a piece of documentation that maybe the inspectors, when they were on-site, couldn't find.

The operations of the society were of course continuously reviewed by both its internal audit function and the external auditors. And because EBS was involved in securitisation programmes and establishing covered bond banks, one of the, I suppose, ancillary benefits for a financial organisation at the time was that in order for loans to qualify and in order for any institution to be able to issue a bond, independent inspectors would come in and review substantially large numbers of cases. And the ... if you didn't hit a 99% or 98% tolerance rate in relation to what documentation should be on file and what was available, you wouldn't qualify in order to issue a bond. So, I don't believe that these documents represent an organisation that had very poor controls but I do believe that it was a valuable exercise on each occasion. The Central Bank, as I said, continues to do these types of inspections and banks do take them very seriously.