Mr. Michael Walsh:

What I can't reconcile, being very simple ... there was a detailed evaluation done by the board, you know, a year after I actually departed, or over a year after I departed from the society. There was also a detailed evaluation done by the regulator in terms of the capital needs. And on the basis of that and, you know, to use their words, they actually evaluated all of the loans on a cash-flow basis. So here we have a board saying in, I think it was probably, kind of, April 2010, you know, we have evaluated the cash flows associated with every single major loan that we actually have and, you know, for right or wrong due to the concentration in the book that should have been easy to do. They came to a view as to what the necessary write-down was. Now, for some peculiar reason and, you know, I have no idea what it was, the amount of the write-down actually almost doubled between April 2010 and September 2007, or September 2010, sorry, I get my years confused sometimes. Now, I don't know what actually happened over that five-month period for the board to actually agree to accept prices which were effectively 40% below what they had done as valuations. I mean, I have looked, obviously, at the NAMA reports, and if I look at say, tranche 1, I see that the society uniquely accepted a valuation which was below the market value of the underlying properties. I can't understand that, I can't rationalise that but that's what they actually did. I think it is fair to say that I did talk to my successor on one occasion in relation to a particular project, which probably should remain nameless, but it's actually the largest in terms of what's defined as the spec projects, and his view at the time was that they had an offer which was more than double the price they could actually convince NAMA to accept the transfer at. Now, I don't know, but I think the view of the board, and I can understand exactly where they were coming from, was, you know, NAMA had been set up, it was Government policy that everything would be transferred to NAMA, and I suspect that the board saw themselves as price takers but, as I say, I'm not an expert on property, I wasn't there at the time, so it is entirely supposition.