Ms Cathy Herbert:

Well, I think that the ... the difficulty about the, as you said, the continuing hole in the Government ... in the banks was that this was something that got worse, not by virtue that we didn't do the sums right but the situation got worse and the hole got deeper and bigger. And, I mean, the NAMA process obviously was going to crystalise a lot of losses for the banks. And that situation ... so it was ... it was a rolling situation.

And then the proposal for ... from the ... in the bailout to, if you like, stuff the banks with money to shore up ... or to bring back market confidence, that was a proposal that was, you know, it was one way of doing it. But the Minister would have liked, as you know, and the Government would have liked to ... some burden sharing at that time that would lessen the amount of money that would have to be put into the banks.