Mr. David Gantly:

It would have been, I'd say, out of the ordinary. Not ... I'd... if we ... when we went back to... going back to 2007, which was in a sense where we started this, one of the responses that I initiated as I saw the markets starting to dry up ... we would have used securitisation, which, obviously, was an obvious tool for us to use given the nature of the balance sheet with 85% of the assets were residential mortgages. So in the normal course of events, you know, pre ... let's call it up to mid-07, I mean securitisation from the 90s on had become more sophisticated, wider investor base and we could use securitisation to fund longer term. And, typically, a securitisation would be funded for five years ... would be the duration and I know Mr. Went earlier referred to the weighted average life on mortgages being somewhere around six so we were actually, kind of, almost match-funding the assets.

So when the conventional sources of securitisation actually started to dry up, I was extremely nervous about what was going on in the marketplace. What we started to do was we identified with the help of our colleagues in the wider bank to ... we identified the pools of mortgages. If you want to do a securitisation, you'll say ... typically say €1 billion or €2 billion in that case in that instance. They have to satisfy certain criteria. You've got to have ... you've got to be able to ... because they're going to be put into a special investment vehicle and the cash flows have got to be very clear. There's a lot of criteria that it must kind of adhere to.

So back in '07, faced with the markets as I saw them, I put in place a plan to create pools of ... to have pools available for essentially what would have been deemed to be internal securitisations. So at the time then, the ECB in the normal course of events would, as I said earlier, would be engaged in repos in their normal market activity and would get more involved with, you know, as required I guess. And at the time, residential mortgages counted as tier 1 collateral for drawings with the ECB so this was a very valuable asset for us to have.