Mr. Brendan McDonagh:

As I said in my opening statement, when we started out we had €15 billion worth of assets overseas, which is a substantial amount in any portfolio. It was certainly very important that we had overseas assets in the early days, when Ireland had gone into a troika programme. The whole commercial and residential property and land market here had just died; there were no buyers and prices were dropping rapidly. We used that period to look at our overseas portfolio and to generate cash. Thankfully at the time, we caught a bit of a wave.

After the 2008-2009 crisis, most of our overseas assets were based in London, to the value of about €10.5 billion. We sold mainly from 2010 to 2016 into a rising market and we did very well with the London portfolio particularly. We had about €2 billion of assets in the US and about €2.5 billion of assets in other locations in Europe. The sale of those assets in the UK was pretty straightforward because it is the same legal system as in Ireland by and large. Certainly the sale of assets in other overseas jurisdictions was sometimes quite difficult because we had a lot of local vagaries in law which we had to take account of. Thankfully, we go out of the overseas market. It was always our objective to be out of it as much as possible by the end of 2016 and we achieved that. As of today, what we have left is only about €3 million in London. In regional UK we have about €40 million and in the rest of the world including the US and continental Europe we have about another €40 million.

It is less than €100 million, as I said in my statement. As of today, all our portfolios are effectively Irish-centric. Some 70% of the portfolio is in Dublin. Dublin and the contiguous counties, or what we call the commuter belt, and Cork, Limerick and Galway account for about 98% of the portfolio. We have only about 2% in what we would call regional Ireland. It is a good place to be at this point.