Mr. Peter Fitzgerald:

Yes, it was an issue. And if you go back to late 2007, early 2008, it was obvious to us that the markets that we were funding both corporate and retail deposits from were too thin. So if you take a retail deposit business, for example, we were operating out of Ireland, which is quite a small market in European terms, the Isle of Man, which is very small, and the UK had at this stage over three years produced 50% of our retail deposit funding. So we knew that we needed to diversify.

And hence I worked on a plan with my team for a retail expansion into Germany, which was actually pretty much launch-ready shortly after the nationalisation of the bank. And we presented that to Donal O'Connor at the time. And obviously the bank had been nationalised so it didn't go any further. But there was certainly a strategic intent, to your point Deputy, that we were stretching our existing markets for too much funding and we needed to get into at least one or more ... to European markets on the retail side. And the other strategic development was we had got approval in the United States to raise deposits from a limited number of jurisdictions in North America, which again would have opened up much further funding capability. So in the ... I think one of the messages from the 2008 results was that the aim of the bank, predominantly through the customer deposit side, was to be 100% loan-to-deposit ratio by 2011.