Mr. Brian Cowen:

Straightforward in the sense that ... Nothing was straightforward, Deputy. I mean, these are big decisions; they are not straightforward. You know, the Minister for Finance puts out the position, he explains where it's at, he goes through the details of what's envisaged, what's involved. We got in writing, recommendations on this from the NTMA and the Central Bank that this was something we could run with if we had to. So the question of what we are trying to achieve here is to drop the balance sheet, you know, there's pros and cons in all of this. But there's no doubt, at the end of the day that you see regardless of ... leave out the European involvement for the moment, leave out all the other stuff ... Ireland as a country had to get to this position. We had an economic programme that we had agreed on that would get us to that position. That economic programme formed the central plank of this programme that gave us access to the money to implement it. So, in that sense, we were facing up to our responsibilities. Thankfully, there was a programme there which helped us get through this very difficult period. We had made the point and it was clear in the memo that whilst the IMF percentage interest is a calculation and the European one - we were the first entrants into the programme, it was the first new programme - they were, sort of, on the basis that, I think I've referred to it in my statement ... on the one hand, they wanted it to be affordable, on the other hand, they didn't want it to be so attractive that those who were getting into trouble wanted to come into it. So they were sending it out, it ended up basically about 5.8% composite interest rate but we had it in the ... it's in the memo and it's an understanding in the programme that we could continue to talk about that, we could continue to talk about this interest rate issue because we weren't exactly saying, you know, "That's great." So the point is that we continued to work on that and as early as November and December, discussions were ongoing about that interest rate.