Mr. Brian Cowen:

Well, the NAMA decision was based on looking at all the options before that by ... by Peter Bacon and ... and we came up with this solution of NAMA. The question of the 30%, this was the problem that I might have mentioned before, earlier, and that was, you know, you had the duty of accountability to the ... to the House, when you're putting through the legislation, where people were asking what sort of haircuts are we talking about? And this was the first guesstimate, if you like, well it was a guesstimate, by definition. And the problem is, you know, on the one hand you're trying to give the House an idea as to what might be entailed here and the second thing then is if it doesn't work out right ... you're not accused of misrepresenting it or misleading ... but it creates another problem and it creates a ... an issue, externally more so than internally, where people are saying, "Well, do they know ... have they got their arms around this at all?" So to that extent, it wasn't helpful. If you were doing it again, you'd still have to go into the Dáil and ask people to take on legislation without you being able to give them the detail that they were looking for and of course, that's difficult as well. So you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. But the point is in any event that it wasn't a good way of building confidence in the process, when you ended up with a 57% average haircut, as distinct from a 30% prediction.

It does have the benefit though of being transparent. People always look for transparency. Transparent in the sense that, you know, you're ... you're putting your cards on the table as to what ... the number of loans you were talking about, what number of debtors you were talking about and what the haircut was gonna be, having done a very granular case-by-case examination of the loan books. The question you then ask is, did this ... was this a contribution to us having to go into the bailout? I think, unfortunately, that the bailout issue arose in terms of the banking situation was that the ECB was running out of patience in terms of the ... the liquidity provision being provided and the amount that was being provided. And they felt that we needed to come up with a solution that wasn't based on, as Mr. Trichet said, providing liquidity ad infinitum. So I don't think the NAMA process contributed to it but I think sometimes the predictions you were making about what the level of haircuts ... and not being able to stand over it when you got to the end of that process, did create a sort of a dissonance out in the international investment community as to whether we were on top of it or not.