Mr. Jeremy Masding:

Because of the risk of the assets. If there is another economic shock those assets are likely to be the assets that will cause us real difficulty around our capital base. Banks need to have low NPL ratios. It is a regulatory requirement for us to have ambitious and credible plans to reduce NPLs. Permanent TSB is an outlier and therefore we have to look at all alternatives. In my opening remarks I explained to the committee the different alternatives we have considered. We are very clear that a loan sale is the least worst alternative. There is one data point that I asked the team to get for me, which I thought was quite interesting. I asked the team to get the historical Irish average of bank NPL ratios in the 1990s and the 2000s in order to get a comparator at a time when we are talking about NPLs. It was less than 1%. Ours is currently at 16%. We all need to take a step back and agree what it is we are trying to do here. From my perspective, I am trying to do the right things for the taxpayer. I have a quote from last week-----