Mr. Brendan McDonagh:

Well, the purpose was this: it was that, under the NTMA Act, the NTMA had lots of discretion and had to operate under guidelines, ministerial guidelines, that was issued each year by the Minister to the NTMA in terms of how we're going to manage the national debt. And we had a certain amount of discretion to operate on that basis and, on that basis, we took our responsibilities seriously. We placed deposits in institutions when we had surplus money to try and earn an incremental return, which would go against the debt service costs, and I suppose it came ... we took the view from 2007 onwards that we weren't going to pay ... it wasn't worth us, as senior executives in the NTMA, that we regarded this almost as the State's money as being our own money; that we wouldn't place that at risk and that, if we were told to place it at risk, and there was lots of arm-twisting trying to tell us to place it at risk so that it ... and the view was, of the chief executive, Dr. Somers, and the rest of the senior management team, was that, "We don't think it's the right thing to do but if you tell us to do it, then you better direct us to do it so that if something goes wrong, we can say that we wouldn't have done this voluntarily, that we're doing it on the basis of a direction."