Mr. Brendan McDonagh:

Well, one of the ... the consequence I foresaw would be that ... in my first response ... my first line of that, Deputy, if I bring it to you, it says, "This is very difficult to answer as [a] potential real exposure to the Exchequer of writeoffs is not yet independently quantified." And if it turned out that you did have write-offs ... and just being selfish about it, if we had taken collateral that wasn't worth what the banks said it was worth and it was write-offs for the Exchequer, then the markets ... it's like the markets smell blood and they would say, "You've a problem. If you want to borrow money from us, you're going to pay much more for it." There was no question that we couldn't ultimately borrow the money but we were ... I suppose, in September 2008, you know, there was really a ... talk about a budget adjustment having to happen which was ... the Minister was talking about doing his budget in October 2008 - and this was September 2008 - that ... you know, Ireland was in a great position of having a debt-GDP ratio of 25%, suddenly our budget deficit was ballooning, not to do with the banks but on the fiscal side. But now, you add the banking problem on top of that ... and at that stage I thought maybe if we were forced to borrow €20 billion, even if we could borrow it, and we ... and it was against collateral which wasn't worth what we were given, then this would be a big issue for us.