Mr. Eddie Cullen:

Deputy Penrose asked a question on loan sales and Ulster Bank has done a number of loan sales. All banks in the eurozone have been under significant pressure from the regulator of the ECB on their non-performing loan books to try to reduce the percentage of non-performing loans on bank balance sheets and ensure they are open for business and are making credit available to customers.

In our case, Ulster Bank was not part of NAMA. We were bailed out by the British taxpayer, not the Irish taxpayer. We were not part of NAMA so we carried all that non-performing debt on our balance sheet. We engaged in loan sales. The last such loan sale, which was labelled Project Oyster, last year included some designated farmers, and we would have engaged with lots of stakeholders, both farming bodies and politicians. As we explained at the time, the "farm debt" we sold as part of that last loan sale was farmers who had off-farm debt, typically commercial real estate. We did not sell any debt that farmers had borrowed for the farming enterprise. Our experience historically over the many decades we have been involved in agri-lending is that farmers who invest in the farming enterprise perform very well when one takes it through the cycle view.

We have now reduced the non-performing loans on our business banking side to a relatively low level. As to whether I can predict the future and say it will never happen again, I cannot say that. Ulster Bank has come to a much more normalised level of non-performing loans on our business banking balance sheet. That has been a very positive thing for Ulster Bank in terms of its go-forward position and its ability to work with customers and make new credit available off a loan book of a little over €5 billion. We advanced new credit of €1.3 billion into the economy of the Republic of Ireland last year, which relative to the overall size of the Ulster Bank book is a significant level of new credit. About half of that was to new customers as opposed to new lending to existing customers. I hope that gives members some clarity on that point.