Mr. Lar Bradshaw:

Thank you. We were well down the road to a transaction that I believed in my heart was absolutely the right thing for the authority in delivering the metrics that I wanted us to be measured against. They are out there for everybody to see. We were well down the line on that. As it happened we did not change our exposure in the meeting. Literally, the night before we were due to finalise, we discovered that Anglo Irish Bank and Bank of Ireland were in the frame. Now the question was what should we do? I know members will not suggest that we should say we should not do this transaction because of a piece of information we discovered the night before. The only issue was should I have said that I should leave this meeting for this discussion on the final bid price we were committing to. That is the only issue. We discussed that at length and concluded that it is a tricky one but if we ever had to discuss it, we would tell people what was going through our heads. Members will be aware that we subsequently got legal advice to see whether that was right or wrong. The legal advise was that not alone had we acted prudently but we erred on the side of caution. My belief was that we did not act on the side of caution, we had got it just right.

I am explaining to members what was going through our heads. As it happened, we did not change our position on the authority's exposure. I know there has been much discussion about this - I have seen it in previous minutes of a PAC meeting that we delegated the final decision - and I know that Ms Loretta Lambkin has read out at a meeting that in recognising Bernard McNamara's expertise we would delegate a decision up to €430 million. Let us be clear, it was not difficult for us to do that when Bernard McNamara had accepted that anything over €375 million would be at his risk. In my opinion that was not some dereliction of duty on our behalf.