Mr. Brendan McDonagh:

I suppose within the NTMA, at senior management level, it wasn't ... we ... I suppose we all had the same view. We're, sort of, conservative, cautious people that this ... we would do this and we'll see what happens. We weren't necessarily out of the markets forever but just see what would happen. But, I suppose, in terms of our dealers who were in the front office, who were dealing with these institutions they were placing deposits with, they were getting a lot of questioning saying, "What are you up to? Why won't you place the deposits back with me? I'll pay you more money for that deposit", you know, and they ... of course, they wouldn't be aware ... they would just know the decision was taken. They wouldn't know the whole rationale or whatever behind it. And I suppose then, as September 2007, at the time, there was an NTMA advisory committee because there was no board. And this would have been communicated to the advisory committee about what we're doing. And then there was another advisory committee in December and I suppose, the view would be, you know, everybody else is placing deposits with the banks, guys, what do you guys know that nobody else knows, you know, and we were, sort of, saying "Well, we're not really sure we know anything but just that we're not comfortable about placing deposits out in the banks and we just want to see, you know, what's going to happen." And as I said in my statement, it ... things got worse and we were proved correct but we weren't quite sure. We just knew some ... we just got a sense from the markets that it was becoming more difficult to fund. We were trying to fund ourselves in the short-term market to build up a war chest and while it was very easy in the first half of 2007 to build up that and you can do it completely under the radar and nobody takes any notice, people were beginning to say, "Well, you know, you're borrowing a lot of money short term, what are you up to?", and you were trying to keep it under the radar. So, we could see it was harder for us to borrow and we also could see on the other side that people on the other side were becoming very thirsty for us to place deposits back with them. So we, sort of, said, "Well, what's wrong here? Is this shortage of liquidity, we're not the only ones doing it, so let's just hold on."