Pearse Doherty (Donegal South West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Okay, I'll move on. Mr. Neary, Dermot Gleeson gave evidence to the committee ... he was talking about a meeting, the meeting the night of the guarantee, and he says, and I quote:

During the course of the night we suggested to the authorities that a sentence in their draft statement about the guarantee, which said something like [quote] ‘Financial Regulator has informed the Government that all the Irish banks were solvent [end of quote] was probably unnecessary and possibly dangerous in the sense that Anglo shares would be traded on foot of it, which could lead to complications for the Government.

Now that was Mr. Gleeson. Eugene Sheehy of AIB made his own notes of the meeting, these have been presented as evidence to the committee. In them, Mr. Sheehy said:

There were also issues in the Government's draft which we were uneasy about relating to attestations by the FR [Financial Regulator] that the system was solvent and that all banks were solvent. We felt there was clearly a risk in this statement if market participants purchased shares in companies once the guarantee was issued and it subsequently transpired that these companies were not as strong as contended.

Did you make that suggestion, that that statement be included in the draft?