Mr. Eugene Sheehy:

Thank you, Deputy. I think most of Professor Black's observations were based on his US experience, and he did make references to liar loans and the like. In general terms, you know, he is trying to transfer the ... his US observations into the Irish market. When you look at, you know, what he said, if you do grow loans and there is a market crash, which is a one-in-100-year event, banks are going to suffer greatly. Banks absorb the risk between short money and long money and when there's a problem of that nature, it will materialise in falling asset values and problems for banks. So, in general, I agree with his observations. In AIB, our economy was, in those years, held up as probably the highest-performing economy in the world. Our demographics were totally different to the market that he was drawing reference to. So, some of his analogies, you know, are right, but I think the basis from which he is extrapolating one observation to another is fundamentally unsound because it was a different, totally different, economy.