Mr. Brendan McDonagh:

Because we had taken a view from August 2007 which was really even a month before the Northern Rock thing, that there was trouble brewing in the capital markets and we had a lot of money, and what we called wholesale money, short-term money, money deposit, and we had taken a view ... I was responsible for counterparty credit limits at the time, as the NTMA's director of finance I had a discussion with Dr. Somers, chief executive, and we discussed the thing that the financial markets were acting strangely. A number of hedge funds were beginning to fail. I think the first hedge funds began to fail around August 2007 which was some BNP Paribas hedge funds. I agreed with Dr. Somers that I would instruct our dealing team that as deposits matured we would just hold those deposits in the Central Bank of Ireland.