Ms Fidelma Clarke:

Forgive me. If I spoke about the board. I think others have spoken today and last week and I, based on my knowledge, however it has been garnered, I believe the board wanted to preserve EBS as a mutual independent building society. And I think if ... and I have reread the annual report and accounts of EBS over those years and they are informative in relation to what the key areas of focus for the society were. And I suppose I'm really taking my information from there. There was a desire to do what EBS had been established to do. Provide mortgages to teachers, guards, nurses and, in the main, PAYE workers, that was EBS's core business. But through time the pressure on margins as a result of what we now know is absolutely excessive competition meant that EBS was under pressure to be able to create capital. And, I think, as Mr. Merriman has explained well earlier today, without the ability to create capital, it wouldn't have had any credit to make available to mortgage providers. And, therefore, in effect, it didn't have a business model.

And I think that influenced its view to look at whether or not it felt that there were other forms of non-core business it could get into, and I suppose, because it had entered commercial property lending in the early 1990s, it possibly felt that it had built up 15 years of experience in that area and, therefore, stepping further along the spectrum in whatever way, as we now know, was decided, was ... was appropriate at the time.