Mr. Brian Cowen:

The impact ... the impact of having an ... IMF personnel coming over. If the EU were just coming over and we were having continuing consultations, I don't think it would have the same impact if you hadn't an IMF person with them. Now, they were coming over and there was no intention ... what we were trying to do basically, is to ... and I know it's done in a way that ... it's not meant in any way to mislead because there's no benefit in a Government misleading its own people. We weren't doing that. I was in a Cabinet that did a devaluation once and we knew about it the minute it was done. Sometimes you have to do things that way to for the purpose of confidentiality and for the purposes of maximising whatever leverage you have. But the point is, in relation to this particular matter, we were simply trying to get as full a picture as we could before formally applying for a bailout as to what it would look like. And if we ... because I can understand ... you see, the political miscalculation is, you know, the negative of people saying, "Oh you're entering a programme." But the positive was we were going to get money for a three-year period without wondering what the fluctuations in the market ... the markets were going to be. You were going to have money at a certain rate for that period to do a job which you'd set out in the four- year programme, which is going to be very difficult to do anyway but which had to be done. So, the point I am making is that we were, as I say ... Brian was saying, "I don't have a mandate to say ...", it's not for Brian Lenihan or Brian Cowen on his own to say, ''We're going into a programme', it's a question of the Cabinet making that decision. And we were coming to the point where we were getting the necessary clarity about where they were going and what they were looking for from us that we felt was in line with what we wanted to do anyway. And the final point I'd make - I'm not stopping you - is that when we did go into the programme, it was on the basis of a prior Cabinet decision that we were adopting our own programme. In other words, they weren't going to be imposing it on us, we had a central plank prepared and ready to do-----