Mr. Andrew Blair:

I will certainly try. On the compensation amount, the £400 million to which the Chairman referred, that has been set aside in order to meet the costs of the programme and also to refund the complex fees. In the context of the complex fees, I quoted some statistics for Ulster Bank earlier. The total amount involved is just more than €1 million, including interest, and it affects 19 customers that we have identified to date. We are very close to the end of that process.

In terms of the point raised by the Chairman about trying to separate customers that had businesses with attendant other debt that may not have related to those businesses originally but to some other activity, in many cases, property, during the period from 2008 to 2013, as I said earlier real efforts were made to try to support customers to do things that would enable them to survive. In a normal environment some of those activities would have been to realise the assets that were creating the burden on those businesses. In that period, the ability to realise assets, as everybody who lives in the country knows, was extraordinary limited, if not non-existent for a period probably through to the end of 2012. If one were outside Dublin, it would be even more limited than that. Some of the actions that would have been available to people in order to restore businesses to health were effectively closed to them.

That is the perspective I have on this which is that real efforts were made to try to support people through to viability. The separate point, which comes up in some of the questions that have been asked, is whether we then took a decision to restore the bank to financial health and restore the balance sheet of the bank to put it in a position where it could begin to support and grow in the economy. We took the decision to realise those assets and by that I mean the loans and we did that with the full knowledge of our shareholder and indeed the views of the regulators taken into account as a necessary step to make Ulster Bank a viable business and to make Royal Bank of Scotland a viable business. That is why we did that. We did not "not seek" opportunities to try to separate businesses and give them a future, but at the end of the day, we had to take steps to restore the viability of our own business and we did what we thought was the right thing to ensure that we could remain a systemic organisation in this country.

The Chairman asked about West Register, let me go back and be absolutely certain about the issue of the directorship. I am absolutely certain as I sit here now that I never had a shareholding in West Register. I may have been a director of that company for a short period. I do not recall, but I will clarify that, Chairman.