Mr. Frank Daly:

I do not claim Senator, to have any particular financial expertise but I would say that seems to me an extraordinary concentration of lending into one particular sector of the Irish economy. I am not saying all of it is not valid. Obviously it is and there would be lending in there to agriculture and industry and retail and mortgage lending, which is obviously, in many cases, quite valid. But €400 billion into an economy where the GNP was €160 billion seems to me extraordinary.

You asked about impressions. The other impression, I suppose, two points. One was the way, the extent to which interest was being rolled up by the banks. The extent in fact, to which, in some cases, new loans were being created to take account of the rolled up interest. That, it seemed to me, was quite unusual. Then, I suppose, the other aspect of it was - this may have come later but certainly we became aware of it fairly quickly, the extent to which banks were not really attempting to collect income that was coming to debtors. Rental income in particular is a case in point. One of the things we did in NAMA when we took across the loans and when we engaged with the debtors was to say, "Well you have a loan on an asset, and that asset is earning a rental income. Why do you think it should be going into your pocket now and not coming into NAMA"? We set about capturing all of that rental income. I am not sure that the banks were taking any great steps to do that in the years up to the crash.