Ciarán Lynch (Cork South Central, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Okay, all right, thank you.

I just want to move on to some matters relating to the lending period from 2003 onwards and just present a number of documents to you that are in your pack. EBS increased commercial and development lending significantly in the period from 2003 onwards. I'll just go through some of the slides that we have here. The first one here is actually this one that went up. Okay, you see at the top of the screen there, Ms Clarke, "A self assessment process has been completed on commercial property lending and 29 risks were identified, one of which was external. There are 6 risks that are considered high in nature". It then goes through various bullet points. Just noting the first two of them, "Concentration risks on large exposures which could provide a bad debts exposure or large redemptions". And, secondly, "Making losses due to bad lending decisions".

I'll just move on to the next slide, which the 005. What we have here at the end of the page is a whole load of product offering by the society and just how ... and the upper slide ... a demonstration of how the whole mortgage market was moving in 2006.

On to the next slide, which is 006, the highlighted section there is "Change the Stress Test on Interest Rate" and how the current policy, which was a stress test at the standard variable rate in the next column of +2% to move up to a 6% that you were exceeding to maybe be 1% above it.

And the on to... I'll just skip on to another couple of slides. This is from 2005 and it says 100% mortgages move from pilot to permanent solution. EBS are considering a number of options round 100% mortgages at the time. Option 1 is "Increase Price" and that is not considered an option. As you can see this is in red, because consideration as "Market pricing would make it difficult to charge a higher rate for this product. Most lenders are charging between 3.1% and 3.25% for this product", that's some less the standard variable rate. There is 2, "Reduce Cost", which is "Genworth have indicated that they will not reduce pricing for this cover. We may be able to negotiate some reduction base lending to state guaranteed employment sector; not agreed at this juncture."

I just want to stop there for a moment. What was Genworth's problem?