Mr. Richie Boucher:

I didn't ... I felt that it was a matter of record, Deputy, that I felt that Irish Nationwide had much bigger problems than the market and people realised. I got ... as I said, I was very shocked. I had been involved in an exercise back in 2006, late, I can't remember the exact date, where at that time, options were being considered for Irish Nationwide. One of the investment banks had approached us and said, "Would we be interested in looking at it?" Mr. Goggin asked me to, because obviously I was chief executive of retail. I had probably an afternoon of meetings by myself with the then chief executive of Irish Nationwide and his company secretary to discuss their business model to get an outline of the type of lending they did, in particular to understand the franchise value in their mortgage markets with small business lending markets. I got an understanding of what I felt the business model was. I went back to the chief executive and said I didn't feel that there was an opportunity for us and I didn't recommend we pursue it. I recognised as we were coming back up to the night that weekend, I recognised the liquidity problems were not as big. There was a discussion between ourselves and AIB, there was some commentary from the regulator that they felt, well, the haircut on Irish Nationwide's books would be, I don't know, a mid-teens per cent. Whether I had a justification to say it, but I do recollect I said, "Well, whatever they say, it's two or three times that."