Mr. Kevin Cardiff:

No. Look, this is a negotiation. All parties have something they want out of it. So, I mean you have read out a lot of comments I made there and they are honest and I mean every one of them. But almost every single time I made the comment, there is a counter-comment in the next paragraph, almost always, which you haven't read out. Remember, think of us and Anglo or not Anglo. Just take Ireland and a bust bank and just reverse the situation somewhat. We had all of the same problems with the bust banks as the ECB would probably say they had with us. And the bust banks might say that were increasingly hectoring in our tone and so forth. This was a negotiation. People who I was dealing with were very tough at times, definitely hectoring. Sometimes they changed their minds and it didn't suit; other times they seemed to make a promise and it didn't seem to be kept. But they were doing their job to negotiate. So, I mean if you were to go into any negotiation that's a tough negotiation with a lot of different agendas and found that there was no one was being tough, then there was something wrong with the negotiation, frankly. I don't think they were doing anything other than what they saw as their job and, remember, as I make abundantly plain more than once in my statement, they were giving us a huge amount of support. The slight irony in it was that they were dong so with a public reluctance, which actually made the level of support that was required, I think, slight ... bigger. So if the ECB had said November 2010, just after we had agreed to go on the bailout ... if they had said in a very public way, ''Okay, so long as the Irish are sticking to the programme, we are supporting them come what may'.' They would probably have actually have to give us less support than actually arose because in the event, they, sort of, said it's a good thing that they are joining the programme but no big supportive statement. The big supportive statement only came in March after a lot of effort and, you know, the ECB will tell you, legally, they couldn't make those kind of statements.

I don't know if that's true, I expect it's not, or they might tell you that, you know, it wasn't appropriate because we hadn't done all that they wanted us to do, those kind of things. Or, they might have just been holding their fire in order to make us concede a bit more than we wanted to on the various issues between us. But that's life, that's negotiation, that's discussion. They had their agenda; we had ours.