Mr. Brian Cowen:

No, sorry, to make the serious point, I mean, I was the chair of the meeting and I suppose I had to take responsibility for that really, at the end of the day, even though I didn't set about it to happen that way, but I was the chairman. Secondly ... a couple of things happened, the, the, the Secretary General of the Government wasn't there at the start of the meeting. He was, he was preparing for Cabinet the next ... there are various things he has to do and he joined the meeting, you know, it was on a while but not that long, it was on a while before he came in. And he was the only other one from the Department of the Taoiseach there apart from Finance and Central Bank, and you know, the other people. So when he came in I said, "Listen up here this is serious stuff" in other ... which to say, contribute here, you know, I value his input. Third point is that when, when there's ... if you have a Cabinet, I know this wasn't a Cabinet sub-committee meeting but it was, you know, something of ... akin to it, if you like. You normally have a free-flowing discussion and you actually ... note the decision so, so there may have been a bit of thinking on that lines. But I personally would have liked, I'm sorry there isn't a record, let me say that, I personally would liked there to have been a record. When it wasn't, when I ... what happened then that night, when I got two or three hours' sleep, we had to come back, we were in the Dáil, I'd a Cabinet meeting by the following evening. I mean, I, when there wasn't a contemporaneous note I then, what then happened was, the Attorney General sent me ... advices, if you like, which captures pretty well the argumentation. That was to me within, it might be a letter dated the 30th or 1 October. Now I know that's a privileged document, but I understand that, you know, you'd be able to ask questions of the Attorney General, even though it's a privileged document. So that, that might be a way of helping the committee. I know it's ... you're having to reconstruct the thing a bit, and you've heard different versions because people's recollections are different, genuinely, genuinely not thinking of one thing and not another. But I have to say, you know, and I have to take responsibility, I am sorry that there isn't an accurate, full note of that meeting. It would be to the protection of all of us, if there were.