Mr. Brian Cowen:

I wasn't, of course I'm not encouraging the worst excesses of banks. I'm simply pointing out that the banking industry has changed a lot in the last 25 or 30 years. I mean, the old deposit and lend model, where they had, in the older days, after the Depression and into the '70s, where you had uncompetitive banking practices, cartels basically, and you got very little for your deposits, and they went off and made plenty of profits lending your money ... that changed a lot because you had other financial actors come into play, like insurance funds, like pension funds, like people who were able to go to the financial markets directly themselves. So the thing has changed, the scenario has changed, and part of that financial services is a legitimate area of practice. Now, I'm not here as a protagonist, I don't claim to know all the intricacies of the financial services sector, but I'm simply referring to the fact that we had built in this country a sustainable, it appears to me, well-regulated financial services centre, which didn't cause us any problem when the thing hit. What caused the problem was our own domestic banking sector; that's the cause of the problem.