Mr. Michael Walsh:

Well, I think, you know, the reality is first of all corporate governance is actually something that evolves over time. I would have been very happy with the KPMG report. I think it actually set out, you know, a menu of things that could actually be done, should actually be done and, you know, the board would have obviously adopted those. I think you have to recognise though that there is a real danger in corporate governance that it becomes, you know, almost, kind of, a box-ticking exercise where, you know, let's assume that we have terms reference for this, let's assume we check it and, you know, people actually stop thinking. I would say at no stage did the board of Irish Nationwide stop thinking. It may not have always come to the right conclusions, but it, at no stage, stopped being an active board or a focused board. I mean, I think within that series of recommendations - and there are, you know, multiple recommendations there - some of them would have been recommendations that, you know, the society itself would have actually prompted them to do and some of them would have already been in train for implementation.

Equally well, some of the recommendations would have been ones that, you know, one wouldn't have actually agreed with. Now, you know, the problem, being simple about it in the context of that particular report ... that report was completed in November 2008, and while it gave a menu for things to be done going forward, you know, at that point in time the whole issue across all of the Irish financial institutions was working out where they were going in terms of, you know, the global crisis that was actually emerging. So, you know, I would have, maybe in a different environment, spent more time reviewing with KPMG the report and considering it, but, you know, at the time, you know, there was a much greater degree of importance on other-----