Mr. Brian Cowen:

These discussions were about us, what we were going to be doing. Obviously, you'd use your relationships with the European Union to make sure that you were ... that if we were coming forward with a plan, that they would have an understanding of what was doable and how the Irish Government saw you closing this gap over a period, rather than some desktop operation over in the ECB or the European Commission coming in and telling us "You have to do X, Y and Z." We were saying, you know, "We have to do this. We're committed to doing it and we are giving you an assessment of what we think is the best way of doing it, given the amount ... given the journey we have to travel."