Mr. Brendan McDonagh:

I think the major difference, Chairman, is that when NAMA acquired the loan portfolio as part of European Commission approval, we had to get a property valuation for every single asset as at a point in time, as at 30 November 2009. In a bank in doing its impairment exercise, it would only look at, as I say, has anything changed that I'm aware of at this point in time, 31 December, if their accounting year end was 31 December, that would cause me to say that something happened that actually would result in the cash flows, I expect then the loan not to occur. So you can have what is called this time lag effect that while you expect maybe prices to fall in the future or the economy is going into downturn that hasn't actually happened at that point in time. So you had this, I suppose, it's best illustrated by the following is that, you know, NAMA started acquiring the loans from institutions on 31 March 2010, but the first time the banks really recognised the scale of the losses they had was at the end of 2010 once NAMA had reported the loans, you know. They weren't obliged to recognise those losses at 31 December 2009 because under IFRS effectively the NAMA event had not yet happened. It was something that was going to happen after 31 December, and that is the fatal flaw in IAS 39. And IFRS, 9, the new regulatory context coming effective 1 January 2018, actually says if you're aware that something is likely to happen then you have to take account of that of that when you do-----