Professor Alan Ahearne:

Sorry, Deputy. You can imagine newspaper reports coming out about depositors, let's say, with AIB ... every day news coming out of the property market continuing to fall in 2009 and '10.

If AIB had held onto those assets, people would say, "Is this additional decline or is bankruptcy of this borrower, does that mean that this bank is now bust and I have to withdraw my ... and I should withdraw my deposits?" One of the advantages was, you took the high-risk loans and you put them into an institution that did not need to raise deposits, and that cleaned up ... helped to clean up the bank's balance sheets.