Mr. John Moran:

Yes, well I ... the papers actually include the October EMC paper and I didn't have the time to go back and look at what stage was this first, sort of, discussed at ... at the ... at the EMC. But I think it's probably helpful to understand, in terms of deadlines along the process, right, that ... that we had been dealing with the legacy, if I call it that, of a promissory note funding that had been set up for IBRC, pretty much from the beginning. Okay? I mean, I had discussions ... people think that this idea of a liquidation suddenly popped out of nowhere in the middle of that year.

This was something that we had been discussing, we had been discussing all sorts of different options from back in 2010, that might actually sort of deal with how we would resolve banks, how we would deal with everything else, so lots of these ideas were moving around. The intensification that you can see in the papers from October onwards was an intensification that was driven by a number of things. There were budgets coming down the end of that year. There were implications of some of the decisions around what that would mean to the deficit. So there were an awful lot of moving parts in the process and there was an ongoing discussion every time we met the troika about how could we deal with the ultimate problem, which was that as Ireland would approach the exit of its bailout, we needed to be able to say without any reservation that its debt was sustainable. And the presence in the system of the promissory note, which was ultimately Government debt, had carried historical and therefore high interest rates, not representative of the rates at the time, was causing difficulties in that respect, both in terms of duration of the debt, sorry, in terms of the interest rate burden of the debt and also its duration and that's where it started. October, you can look at the EMC papers in November, you can look at December, as we got closer and closer to the budget decisions were to be taken whether or not we could do something on our own or we would continue with negotiations. Obviously, our Department weren't involved, it was done by the Central Bank, and I think actually what I would like you to take from the process of the papers you have hopefully seen is just how much thought went into all the various options. The decisions whether it might have been wise, unwise to move unilaterally, how we would deal with the ECB, what we may do with the other troika partners and the consultation with all the various stakeholders, leading ultimately to the decision in December, or sorry, in the beginning of the new year, once we actually had gotten to a much better place.