Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 6 May 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. Richie Boucher:

It's hard to be...kind of ... with mathematical precision about it Deputy, but we certainly were over-exposed. We believed that as a proportion of our group balance sheet, that was manageable. We believed that it was diversified so there was a bigger ... a bigger proportion outside Ireland. We didn't take sufficient recognition of the potential correlation between property markets in Ireland and the UK and the rest of the world. And in our submission to the European Commission as to one of the mistakes that Bank of Ireland made, we said that we had too heavy of an exposure. I think we took too much comfort from proportion rather than absolute hard limits and now we have hard limits.