Dr. Colin Hunt:

AIB as a whole has had a solid start to the year. We are responding to customer demand so if our small and medium sized businesses, many of which are already heavily reliant on the British marketplace, are deciding to defer investment and are not demanding funds from us, we are not going to be supplying lending into the market. We are very eager to support our customers at this time. We are eager to see lending to SME enterprises growing over time. We have restructured the way we address this market in recent months to become ever more customer focused, to have an end-to-end solution for our customers in the business space. It is a simple truth that Brexit has had an extraordinary impact on business confidence. We have been running a Brexit sentiment tracker for the past number of years both north of the Border and in the Republic. It is overwhelmingly negative on SME expectations for Brexit. One things that has struck and surprised me has been that the degree of negative sentiment is much greater in the Republic than north of the Border. That is a reflection of the scale of the British marketplace versus the Irish one and also of the clear dependence and reliance of many small and medium sized Irish enterprises on the UK as an export destination. Those enterprises are typically outside Dublin and supporting communities around the country, typically those in the food and agri spaces.