Mr. Eugene Sheehy:

No. I understand exactly what Mr. Daly was saying. And if you look at a loan application, where an individual could have been in business for 20 years in a trade, i.e. property construction, and has developed a net worth in that business, there are a couple of options open to the individual. They could say, "I'll cash out here and take my cash off the table," and try to continue on with non-recourse lending ... trying to get that ... "Or I'll leave everything I have in the business". By and large, to my recall, almost all of the developers we'd have dealt with left everything in the business. Now, then you come to the kind of intellectual argument about is leaving everything in the business the same as committing to the business? It is. I mean, if you have made money over decades and you leave it all in the business, and that is then recognised by the bank as equity, not cash, but as equity, I think that's entirely correct. And I'll just go ... add a little bit to it. I mean, when I was a branch manager I dealt with a lot of SMEs and start-up businesses, they never had cash. People who go into business rarely have cash, because when you go into a town you'll see banks lined up on one side of the street, you won't see "private equity" or "vulture fund" over somebody's door. The banks provided equity for people who wanted to ... provided cash for people who wanted to take risks. And, by and large, that came from a trust-based, personality-based decision, a personal guarantee from parents or supporters. So, you can imagine if everybody ... and we had nearly 40% SME customers and builders ... if the bank had a view that we would not back anybody unless they had hard cash, and disregard their equity, the person coming to the bank who wanted to start a business, had a house worth €150,000, a mortgage of €75,000, wanted to get seed capital to start off, and we said, "You know what? Go away, we don't recognise that." Society wouldn't be-----