Professor Alan Ahearne:

I think, I mean, we would have been in and out by ... but I think it was certainly over a long period of time, it was eight to ten years. The problem with ... it had a large amount of assets, loans. It’s ... if you try to sell loans, deleverage very quickly, you have to take big haircuts on those loans, if you can find a buyer at all. And if you’re taking big haircuts you’re adding to the losses so the Minister was conscious that in deleveraging, particularly in an environment with very little appetite for Irish assets, you would have to be very careful and do it over a long period of time.