Mr. Eamonn Crowley:

Our non-performing loan, NPL, ratio is 3.3%. It represents a portfolio of approximately €650 million. We estimate approximately half of those should work out. Approximately half of that portfolio are in long-term difficulty. The regulator has imposed quite significant capital requirements on banks across Europe around either retaining or reducing NPLs. Indeed, those quite significant capital requirements would involve a bank using its capital to support NPLs when, in fact, it could be using that capital to help support new lending and the ratio is in the region of 10:1.

To take our €300 million worth of non-performing loans, NPLs, that are in difficulty, that would support about €2.5 billion of lending into the economy. There continue to be quite stringent requirements from the ECB around how banks manage NPLs and we keep that under constant review.