Dr. Michael Somers:

Well the ... I was under ... every meeting I attended of the Department of Finance, Central Bank, whatever, I came under pressure to provide money for the banks which I steadfastly refused to do. And we had a meeting of the NTMA advisory committee, I think it was about 6 December, when the pressure was extreme. And I went off and I said I'd have to get legal advice on this as to where do I stand. Because, I mean, the Minister for Finance was my boss and I wanted to see, well, what do I do? Because the legal power that we were using was to borrow money for the Exchequer. It wasn't to borrow money to bail out the banks and that was ... I signed prospectuses, statements to the Stock Exchange and everything else, stating that this was what we were borrowing money for. And this was what ... the undertakings that I gave to banks. We were borrowing money to fund the Exchequer. Here we were being pushed to use that money, which was there to pay the bills at the end of the week, to instead prop up the banks, to provide liquidity for the banks. So I went off and I asked for a legal opinion. I asked, by the way, was this legal opinion provided to you, and I gather it hasn't been, although I have no objection whatsoever to applying ... to giving it to you. It ... I gave it to the two Ministers. I gave it to the Department of Finance and I'm quite happy to share the context ... contents with you.