Mr. Eddie Cullen:

To pick up on Senator Lombard's opening point on our view of schemes like this for the future, we spoke earlier about the differences between the European banking market and the Irish or even the United Kingdom banking market. Schemes like this are one of the key characteristics, and the SBCI and Nick Ashmore are on record that this is where their attention is turning to. Like the other banks, we have been working a lot and proactively with the SBCI to see how we can deploy more guarantee schemes into the future. My view is that we will see more of these schemes. There is appetite in the European agencies to deploy more firepower to Ireland and I believe the SBCI wants to do that. My view is that, as this scheme has done, it opens up credit in areas where perhaps banks were not able to make credit available previously.

That works from our perspective at a cheaper price point, as Mr. Cunningham has outlined, so I believe we will see more of these schemes in the future. We are very willing to support them in Ulster Bank.