Mr. David McWilliams:

He wanted to know what was going on in the international community. I was going to a World Economic Forum event like the one in Davos but in China. He was asking all the time what foreigners were saying. He was asking what people outside Ireland, looking in, were saying and I was keeping him up to date on the conversations I was hearing. There were loads of sessions on the banking system. The purpose for him calling me when I was in China was to see what people on the outside were saying. I told him at one stage that one of the deflating things about being an Irish person is that others do not think that much about us at all. We think that they think hugely about us but they do not. To the extent that I was listening to them, they were saying that all the European banks have problems, that the European Union must come in and that Ireland was in the eye of the storm. They were all sure that there would be some pan-European solution.