Mr. Kevin Cardiff:

Actually, it might have been three ... two and a half. And the reason for that is that you know the Johnny Logan song "What's Another Year?", well, we had a thing called the Johnny Logan working group, which was to find from our own resources an extra year of funding and we actually found that we could probably generate quite a little ... quite a lot. Maybe not a full year of funding, but we could find ways to extend the funding of the State beyond the end of ... of 2013. Now, that was important because, even in 2011, people were starting to say well how are they going to be able to fund in 2014? The answer is we were already working on that. It ... it started you know, we had plans, we would have been able to ... we would have been able to extend the moneys we were getting from the programme. That's ... that's ... so ... so we weren't quite so ... quite so pressed as you might suggest. But okay, so there ... a few months at least of extra funding was potentially available.

Now, why would the NTMA suggest this? Well, the ... the suggestion was that if we could reduce our debt by a few billion arising from this exercise - in other words give less capital to banks, reduce debt a little bit - that would improve our overall situation in such a way as to make us a little bit more of a ... a good bet for the market in terms of giving us money. The downside was that if you want to continue to get funds from your funding partners, then they had to be on board. And, in the final analysis, I think the Government's view was that actually, they should certainly or would be anxious to burn the senior bondholders in the banks that are not going to survive.