Mr. Brendan McDonagh:

No, Deputy, you know, clearly there was published annual accounts but I'm an accountant. They're at a point in time. Two weeks, later two hours later, things can be completely different. I suppose, if you want to go into the management accounting world, you need real-time information in terms of what's your asset-liability profile, what assets have you lent against, are they worth what everybody thinks they're worth or not? And of course, the position was maintained by all the banks in the autumn of 2008 that they were fine, they didn't need capital. If they did need capital they needed a small amount of capital. They'd only take capital if another institution took capital - this sort of silly game-playing was going on. And they'd source capital from third parties if they needed to. Another line is, "This is a global problem, this is not just in relation to the Irish banks."

I think the issue really was that you might have had assets on your balance sheet. Nobody knew what those assets were worth or what the banks were saying. You couldn't go to the ECB and pledge those assets as securities because, as I said in my statement, the ECB wasn't very accommodating at the time - which effectively is a nice way of saying, they were saying to you, "Don't turn up here with those assets because we won't advance you money against them." I suppose the prevailing view ... and I suppose the hope of everybody ... that it was just a liquidity crisis, that it was ... that there is a liquidity squeeze which was beginning to emerge globally, everybody's withdrawing their deposits in the system, nobody's lending to each other even though people are offering big interest rates for you to lend them money. People are saying, "It's not worth my job to get 50 basis points if I'm not going to get the money back." I think the view really is that liquidity ... the view is that all it is is a liquidity problem. And in my view, liquidity is a contributor to solvency but it's not the only issue in insolvency.