Mr. Jeremy Masding:

They are still NPLs and that is the point I make. I apologise if I am not making myself clear. The suite of options is for long-term treatments. If we go back in time to 2012 the troika, the Irish Government and Irish public policy decided that the banks must avoid scale repossessions. That was the policy decision then. As a consequence of that the Central Bank of Ireland asked all banks to put in place long-term treatments, which Mr. O'Sullivan has been at the vanguard of. In the world we live in, those long-term treatments are still non-performing loans. Just because they are treated does not mean they are not non-performing loans. They are still non-performing loans. With a non-performing loan ratio of 16% for a State-owned Irish bank the Governor of the central Bank has said "In terms of risk management, the transfer of credit risk and funding risk to the investment funds that buy loan portfolios constitutes a national reduction in macro-financial risk ...". That is a really critical point. We have run out of options for reducing our NPL ratio. We have looked at all the different alternatives. As I have said, the loan sale is the least worst alternative on the basis that the protection is-----