Mr. Frank Daly:

I will say the questions I would ask the banks were ... would be in the area of: "How much rigour did you put into this type of analysis? Were you driven too much by competition with other banks?" Because there was, and it's been said before this committee before now, a sort of a follow the crowd, a kind of a herd instinct. How much were they influenced by the talking up of property, right across the Irish sort of spectrum, about the very favourable economic backdrop that was there up to 2008? We'd great growth, we'd great growth predictions, we'd the fastest growing economy in Europe, remember.

How much were they influenced by all of that as opposed to how much were they looking at the individual application for a loan for this project, for this amount of money, with, as my colleague has said, particularly in land and development where you will not expect a stream of income for ... I would also look, by the way, at the make-up of who was actually borrowing at that time because that changed, and I know one of your previous contributors has indicated the way in which syndicates became a particular feature of the property market in the period preceding the crash. If I were in a bank I would certainly be looking beyond that syndicate and I would be looking at who's in it, where's the expertise and how much did they know about the property market.