Mr. Kevin Cardiff:

Well, the insurance scheme would also have been untested in an Irish circumstance. I mean, a bad bank/NAMA-type operation had been done in a number of different jurisdictions ... and they had always, you know, they had always proved ... always in the jurisdiction they were used in, they proved to have some effect. The asset protection scheme-type approach had been just started in the UK. The big difference ... about pros and cons, the big difference is that, with the NAMA approach you value every single loan and you know exactly what your exposure is but it takes a year to do it - big problem. The asset protection scheme, you take a punt up front on what the values are going to be. Now, as it happens, had we taken the punt up front, we'd have been very wrong.

That's a simple fact. The banks would've made a killing at our expense. We were afraid ... at the time, we were afraid that the asset protection scheme exposures were too unknowable - turned out we were right. But in the UK case, where they did much the same, they actually did okay out of it. So ... but they were different type of assets. It was probably one of those instances where you can claim wisdom after the fact. But we didn't ... we weren't sure, which was best, but we thought it was better to have a transparent, though slower, NAMA operation than an asset protection scheme operation. The other great advantage of the NAMA operation was that it meant that the ECB, very willingly, handed over billions and billions ... tens of billions of euro to Irish banks; the asset protection scheme wouldn't do that.