Mr. John Moran:

We can, sort of, talk about planning, right, in terms of IBRC. Because I think it's important to understand, sort of, the way things were. And I ... I understood, from the conversations yesterday, there are some documents in the Department that couldn't have been released. I talked about the ... the choices we may have taken in terms of unilateral actions. And the ... in those documents you'll see very considerable long lists of the risks and the pros and the cons of various actions. And it has always been in the documentation that, at a point where the public might believe that the bank is about to be put into liquidation, that there is a significant risk to the assets that ultimately belong to the State. And this is no different, I mean ... bank are probably harder, because you can move your money a little faster, but if you put a furniture shop into liquidation, there's a serious risk that people are going to go and want to go in and take back the furniture they've paid deposits for, right? And the assets of the ... may not be in ... in accordance with liquidation. So, that was the backdrop. Whether it was a Bloomberg story, whether it was a press leak, whether it was just somebody speculating as a creditor, the same risk existed, and that is reflected in all of our documents.

For those that don't think we were actually prepared, right, this is the decision tray for what we call the "red restructure", right, which had a whole load of different choices that we would be making, depending on what would happen along the way. Right? This is actually the pack that I was given on that day, which ... it actually didn't include the meeting with you originally, because I wasn't going to be doing the briefing, with all the telephone numbers of the people who we were supposed to be ringing, as this day went through, with all the people we wanted to tell, because we didn't want this to be a surprise. We wanted all the stakeholders to know we had it all planned. And these are the pages that actually outline all of the things that were gonna happen.

Now, with the best planning in the world, we weren't going to be able to figure out whether it was going to be Reuters or Bloomberg or The Irish Times, or whoever, that might have got wind of it. But one of the other concerns was that if the Minister had gotten a phone call from the board, asking him whether or not he was planning to put the company into liquidation on that day, he couldn't have lied. Right? And if he had told them that he wasn't necessarily ... or, sorry, if he had told them that he was maybe doing that, and withdrawing the support that the State had given to them, which was the only basis on which they could trade, they would of have had no option but to do a liquidation. And that we needed to protect against.

Now, we weren't suggesting that they were going to do anything other than what they would have to do under the laws of the Companies Acts in Ireland. But the protection, which was set up, wasn't just being caught out. The protection was that we had a system that we could put somebody in to, in effect, take over the obligations of the directors, who could be directed by the Minister not to do what they couldn't otherwise be directed-----