Dr. Michael Somers:

What it said to me was that ... I mean, apart from I might be doing with the money, it also said that by providing deposits to Irish banks we could be in breach of two EU laws, that we were providing preference to banks of a particular nationality, i.e. Irish banks, which apparently was in contravention of Article 12 of the treaty, that you can't discriminate on grounds of nationality. And the second thing was that we could be in breach of state aid rules because this would be regarded as state aid to a particular group of banks, and that we were not entitled to provide a state aid unless it was cleared by the European Commission, and that it was unlikely that it would be cleared by the European Commission.

So, it ... the legal advice to me then was, "Well, look, you can't do it." There was a question mark about whether the Minister could do it, but, the advice to me was, if the Minister tells you, I mean, what it said was:

If a policy direction was given, querist would have to treat it as presumptively valid and would have to comply. However, in the absence of a direction, it would not, in my view, be legitimate for querist to pursue the course of action proposed. And, if the Minister wishes querist to adopt this course of action, he has a statutory procedure available to him. This procedure has been provided for the purpose, namely, of transparent ministerial control. It would not be appropriate to bypass, or, in any way, undermine that statutory mechanism by accepting and acting upon informal departmental requests or suggestions. [Sorry, I'm not going to read a whole load of stuff here, but if I may,] Querist owes a good faith duty to prudently manage funds under its control in accordance with law and in accordance with its own assessment of risk. I do not believe it is legitimate for querist to use his fiduciary powers to pursue wider policy objectives, no matter how laudable these objectives may be, without the protection of a ministerial direction.

So, that was the basis on which I said to the Minister, there's my thing, "If you want it done, you will have to direct me to do it, and then I will do it."