Mr. Simon Carswell:

Those public comments were made prior to Jean-Claude Trichet's letters to the then Minister being made public. I was speaking somewhat blind about the content of those letters. My understanding was that the threat at the time if the Government did not accept a bailout of the country - the fear within Government - was less about the money being withdrawn because it had been already been lent by the national Central Bank. The ECB's way of cranking up the pressure on the Irish Government was it could increase the borrowing cost of that money. If you go back again to what was the trigger for the bailout, it was the exposure of the national Central Bank and the European Central Bank borrowing to the Irish banks and how quickly that went up.