Mr. Michael Walsh:

Absolutely not. I mean, from the society's point of view and from the board's point of view, if you get correspondence from the regulator, you actually see it as a menu that you are going to actually use almost as a checklist for things that are going to be done. Now, you don't take it absolutely on the basis of they're 100% right, you're 100% wrong. That's not the way life actually works. You know, there were practical difficulties in some areas and, you know, where there were practical difficulties, you'd actually end up discussing them with ... in my case, I would've primarily been ... kind of, Maurice O'Connell in the early days, or Dr. Reilly or Mr. Neary in the later days. But you would actually recognise what needed to be done, what could be done. You also had to recognise where the society was at any point in time. I mean, I think there was one particular letter that came in, was it March 2007, which was all about, you know, you need to increase your board and your management. Now, you know, in March 2007, where was the society? It was actually in the process of being sold. It was in discussion with, amongst others, GE and, you know, Hypo, but there were a number of other people as well ... probably haven't been mentioned yet and probably shouldn't be.

If you're in the business of actually selling the society over the next number of months you're not going to put in place new directors or new management, because the first thing that's going to happen once the acquisition is completed, the person or the company who actually buys the society is going to make their own decisions on who should be on the board, who should be the executive, who should be at whatever level it happens to be. And to try and actually bring people in, in a framework where you're doing that, is actually completely counterproductive.