Mr. Frank McDonald:

My impression during the period was that no effective controls were being exercised in relation to the lending of money. In the Ireland in which I grew up, the maximum a bank would have lent one would have been two and half times one's salary or whatever. That was very much an issue of prudence. The banks were being prudent by not over-lending to people. In France, for example, it is against the law to lend people more money than they can afford to repay. That is one of the reasons the French banks did not collapse in the way ours nearly did, without the injection of massive sums of money by the State.