Mr. Jeremy Masding:

I do not, but I am accountable for the performance of the bank to the board and, ultimately, the shareholders of the organisation. I speak to investors all the time, whether they be the Department of Finance or the external shareholders. At its simplest, the conversation splits into those matters we can control and those we cannot control. Unfortunately, the matters we cannot control currently place a heavy burden on the share price.

On what we cannot control, investor sentiment about the European banking market is probably as low as I have ever known it. Low-for-longer interest rates hurt European banks more than American banks. Within the European banking market, to my knowledge, Permanent TSB has one of the highest, if not the highest, exposures to tracker mortgages. Low-for-longer interest rates, therefore, are a profitability issue for us. There is dampened eurozone growth, with Brexit looming large. The return on equity, ROE, is a market measure at a point in time which assesses the return a bank makes against the minimal capital it is required to hold or that it believes it should be required to hold. European bank ROEs are as low as they have ever been, probably due primarily to interest rates, along with a lack of confidence about where eurozone economies are going.

The conversation moves from Europe to Ireland and we can apply similar factors to Ireland. The sentiment about the Irish banking landscape is relatively downbeat. Unfortunately, capital intensity is based on a rearview mirror and we still keep a disproportionate amount of capital because of the financial crisis. Obviously, the more capital that is kept, the more returns are depressed.