Mr. John Hurley:

At the weekend, Government would have to consider its options and one of the options they would have to consider would be nationalisation but they seemed to have taken a view against that ... so it could well be that more emergency liquidity assistance would have been given from the Central Bank. That might have been the decision but I would have preferred that that matter was discussed at a weekend and not in the middle of the week. In our stress tests earlier in the year, one of the messages and one of the lessons was "Look, it's very difficult to nationalise a bank in the middle of the week". So, you buy time ... you have other options at the weekend to consider, it might be nationalisation, it might be something else but at least you wouldn't have a run on the guarantee and the Government's decision wouldn't come down.