Mr. David McWilliams:

Yes. I would have thought - and I said it in all my writings - that the normal rules of corporate finance should apply in the case of insolvency. Therefore, the guarantee would have been rescinded as the liquidity problem was already plugged. Then one would have lined up all the creditors in a room and had a bank resolution mechanism as that is the system whereby we as a society deal with bad banks. At the very top, one would have what I call "trust creditors". They are creditors in trust, which is to say depositors. When my mum goes to put her savings into the bank, she does not realise that technically she is lending money to the bank. In her head, it is a nest egg, something for grandchildren and what she has put away for a rainy day. She does not have any realisation that technically in the event of a bankruptcy, she is a lender. Therefore, my solution, as I wrote at the time, was that as simple depositors trust the system, they should be regarded as trust creditors and encircled. Under that, one then has the normal hierarchy of creditors which everybody understands. It happens every single day in this country in receiverships. That is the system we could still have. That answers the Deputy's question. If there were massive insolvencies, they would have been dealt with in the normal way.