Mr. David Went:

Well, we were clearly aware of the issues because we reviewed on a monthly basis the make-up of our funding portfolio. However, we had concluded that for us the primary thing that we looked at was the extent to which customer deposits, long-term debt and securitisation funded our total loan book. And that was about two thirds of it was funded through that, and these were seen as relatively stable sources of funding, and that was ... that, therefore ... and that proportion had been relatively stable over a number of years.

Clearly wholesale funding was required to ... to finance growth and indeed, you know, looking back on it that was one of the, that was one of the key attractions that people saw in the introduction of the euro, as far as the Irish was concerned, because Ireland ... one of the problems that there had been in Ireland, why there had been such a wide divergence of interest rates between Irish rates and European rates, was that there was a relatively small pool of capital and once Ireland entered the euro, Irish banks, who had been somewhat constrained in terms of their access to, to funding, they were now ... they now had access to the second, or one of the two widest and deepest and most liquid markets in the world. So that was ... so that was seen as a very attractive proposition.