Mr. Brendan McDonagh:

Yes absolutely, we are in 2009. A senior person from an institution which is not in NAMA came in to talk to me and he was talking about the lending processes. He said to me that, at one stage, a debtor came in and said to him, "I want to borrow €200 million for a project". He said, "I asked him for a statement of his net worth." He said he took it out of his pocket. He said to me, "You can look at that for two minutes and then I'm taking it back off you, and he put it back in his pocket." He said he could not wait until he left the room to write down what net worth he had. I said "Did you lend him the money"? He said, "Yes I lent him the money to my shame." Effectively, somebody was perceived to be very rich and perceived to be very successful and things like this. I am not saying that this can happen all over the place but I am only saying in terms of one example of one person who said this to me. I think the practices got lax. The banks were seen to be very profitable, property lending was seen to be the clever thing to do, the economy was growing very strongly. As I said in my opening statement, there was a fundamental disconnect between property lending of the banks' balance sheets that somebody in the regulator just did not pick up on and say, "Bank lending has grown by, on average, over 30% per annum and the economy has grown between 6% and 9% per annum." There was a complete disconnect.