Ms Catherine Moroney:

I will deal with access to lodgments and all of that and then deal with the interest piece. I start with access. I can state categorically that we do not restrict cash or coins to times of the day. When we are open, we accept notes, coins and cheques. That is our principle and that is what the branches are for. That is a fact. I will say that we also have night safes. There is a payment services directive and we have a point in the day after which the same-day services payments do not happen. It makes no difference whether one puts it into a night safe or comes into a branch, one gets the value. We have night safe drops available for our customers in designated locations. They are aware of those. There is no restriction on days of the week. When we are open, we are open.

We are experimenting with and have developed coin machines ourselves. There is one in Naas and one in Blanchardstown. These are experimenting with taking coins at other hours and in other ways from our customers. That is in addition to and not instead of the availability of over the counter services. I think I have answered all of the questions in that regard.

I think the Senator wanted a comment on the price of daily banking. To make an overall statement, it is a very cost-heavy business. We seek, overall, to break even in that business but we provide the most competitive price for cash and coin in the Irish market in AIB. I will take any other questions the Senator has on that, but that is the overarching principle.

I move to interest rates. I might start with deposits because the Senator asked about both sides of the book, deposits and-----