Susan O'Keeffe (Labour) | Oireachtas source

Okay. In Vol. 3 of the core documents on page 59 is the statement, the witness statement of Ms Ethna Tinney. She talks here about ... on page 59 at the bottom of paragraph 1, and she is talking about the appropriateness of property relating lending strategies and risk appetite, and she says "There was a sort of feeding-frenzy as the banks clambered over one another to get a piece of the action, especially as new foreign banks had entered the market as competitors." At the beginning of that paragraph she says "Lending large sums to developers was new to the society." and she said "The senior management in EBS, as in most of the lending institutions, were taken in by Ireland's so-called developers and also by their professional and other advisors." Mr. Murphy said in evidence last week "there was a ... reasonable chance of the organisation making it through, had they not been involved in all of that" and by "all of that", he meant commercial property and land and development. So what was going on? I mean, Ms Tinney's observation is that this was new to the society and it was a kind of a frenzy as banks clambered over each other and she goes on to discuss how the senior management were asked to review credit applications and so on, and I'll come to that, but I wonder what your first observation is of that?