Mr. Brian Cowen:

What we were doing ... it wasn't a question of panicking, it was a question of meeting the urgency of the situation where the ECB had come to a view on the fact that there needed to be a change to the present situation of funding the Irish banking system. There was a need ... so there wasn't a question of panicking, there was a question of we being at an advanced stage of discussions with all of the institutions on that point. We were also trying, as I said earlier, to get to a position where we got the maximum possible leeway we could, given that we had very little room to manoeuvre but it was worth trying to do that. But, thirdly, the question of a programme was something that the Irish Government saw as their duty to undertake anyway. We needed to show to the international community ... investor community, as well as everyone else, that we were serious about getting our public finances ... continuing to move down a path that we had started. And we had gone from, you know, serious contractions, starting in '08, worse in '09, then a slight GNP increase in '10 and then moving on to '11 where IMF and others were starting to say, yes, you will see growth coming back into this economy, you will see employment being created again, because we are starting to get our house back in order having come through this crisis. So that's where we were at. It wasn't ... you know, it's often portrayed that, you know, we we're in ... we have to recognise this, its often portrayed that everyone was imposing things on us. We had things to do in our own interests, regardless of what others thought about it. You couldn't continue to run deficits of 11.5% or 10% GNP - its not possible to do that.