Dr. Michael Somers:

I wasn't, but I would have cheered him on if I had known it. I probably did see the thing after it with the questions. I mean, the problem we had with the Department of Finance was we were not the regulator or the controller. We had oodles of other things to be keeping us going and I just ... I earmarked the four ... the three people in the NTMA: John Corrigan, who had a full-time job trying to run the pension fund; Brendan was running all the IT, back office, payments etc.; and Oliver Whelan, who was trying to do the borrowing on behalf of the State; and then I was the CEO, I was trying to keep all the ... the balls in the air. But this was kind of a part-time activity for us. We had no particular expertise in terms of bank restructuring or ... and we didn't particularly want to and we weren't ... you know, mentality-wise, we were not policemen or controllers. We were trying to get on with the businesses that we were charged with. And Brendan was extremely active. I mean, he'd boundless energy and he worked day and night at this thing and he ... I suppose to an extent the rest of us were doing travelling because I was the Irish director on the EIB board, so that took me away out of Dublin two days per month and then we had all the other things going on. You know, we had to do endless marketing in terms of Irish bonds. We had to keep an eye on the pension fund. John Corrigan was doing a lot of that, Oliver Whelan was doing it, I was doing it. Brendan at least was stationary in Dublin. He didn't do a huge amount of travel, so he got dug into these things a lot more than the rest of us did.