Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 24 June 2015
Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis
Nexus Phase
Mr. William Beausang:
Well, I'm ... I suppose there was a sense that there was one opportunity to take a, you know, whatever step that might be to try to create greater confidence in the Irish financial system. What I think, just to elaborate on that a little bit more. I would have been conscious myself that at the time, the UK authorities provided guarantees for Northern Rock. The guarantees over time extended into their capital structure. Now they didn't extend as far as our guarantee did, but they did find themselves in a situation where they guaranteed the deposits first and then they had to move into, you know, wholesale funding and beyond. So there was a sense that you wanted to avoid a situation with a guarantee. I mean, if you are going to ... if you're going to take that approach, you want that approach to be as impactful as possible and not find yourself in a situation where you are tweaking it at a later stage because that would obviously damage your credibility.
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