Mr. John Mulcahy:

I am not sure I would characterise it as a rush. First of all, speaking personally, I thought it was a superb deal from NAMA’s perspective. To shift the whole Northern Ireland portfolio in one go, for £1.3 billion, was an inspired transaction. My fear was that something would go wrong and that possibility would go away and we would revert to dealing with the portfolio piecemeal. That would have been very slow. I never liked the Northern Ireland property market. My belief was that it would perform badly. I thought we would be better holding assets elsewhere. I would characterise the debtors I dealt with in Northern Ireland as unusually difficult. It would have taken a lot of resources. We had a discrete geographical area. There were a lot of shopping centres, which I believed would be an Achilles’ heel and indeed the Deputy has probably seen the close-down of retail in the UK. That is one of the things I was worried about. I did not need to see a whole lot of cashflows to know that £1.3 billion, based on an income roll of £100 million going to £85 million was an extremely good transaction. My worry was that PIMCO, which had put the ball in play, might go away and we would have to revert to dealing with the thing on a granular basis which would have been very slow, tortuous and most unlikely to yield the same result.