Mr. Simon Carswell:

The reference I made there was the fact that many players knew that there was a problem with the non-resident accounts. They knew that they were not non-resident. They knew that they were resident so they were therefore bogus. People recognised that there was a problem, Revenue Commissioners, senior Government departmental officials and the Central Bank. Again, I mentioned it earlier, throughout the scandals the flight of capital was a big fear. If we moved aggressively against these accounts, and it was estimated that there were substantial funds in these accounts, would that scare off the actual non-resident depositors in the Irish banks. There was consideration given to how to find out if they were non-resident or not and the proposal at the time from the Fine Gael-Labour Party coalition in 1983 was to get them to swear an affidavit. The view was to ask every non-resident to swear an affidavit that the account and the money in that account belongs to them and they are not living in the Republic. The view was that that would scare them off and they would just take their money elsewhere. I think the flight of capital risk was completely overplayed in this period. To me it was sometimes a convenient excuse when I looked at the scandals in that period. Particularly in the 1970s and 1980s when the country was on its knees financially, it was totally overplayed and there should have been much more aggressive action. There is a whole other inquiry which looked into all of this and the findings were that absolutely all of those players that I mentioned should have taken the action.