Mr. Brian Cowen:

Well, I don't believe that the members of the domestic standing group believed that such an intervention would ... was likely at that point. I mean, what they were doing was some scenario planning. As you say, the liquidity issue was becoming clear, sort of in relation to ... sort of interventions the ECB were making from the time that Paribas Bank started to require liquidity, so the scenario planning you're talking about, in January, was really about setting out a sort of a work schedule and the scoping exercise was that point, what do you do now ... what sort of work do we need to be doing here.

One of them as you say was in relation to emergency liquidity assistance, and looking at that, as to whether that would be a tool that may be used in the future if things deteriorated or if liquidity could no longer be obtained by the Irish banking system. And they looked at ... the Northern Rock situation obviously came into play there, and that seemed to be a strong consideration that they had. Throughout this period unfortunately, looking back on it now, it doesn't seem to me that there was a realisation that there could be a systemic risk and that they were really talking about developing options in respect of any troubled institution rather than system, so it wasn't clear at that point ... now looking back now perhaps ... but at that point it wasn't clear that there was a need to do anything other than watch the liquidity situation through the establishment of the liquidity group and then be working on contingency scenarios in the event of an institution becoming problematic.