Dr. Michael Somers:

Well, I was kind of aghast at it, when I saw the amounts of money that had been lent to the top 25 individuals. We were out borrowing money to run the country in amounts as low as €100 million, and we did not find the Irish banks very helpful to us. AIB had pulled out ... that they were originally ... we used to, we used to have two ... the two main banks were market makers, AIB and Bank of Ireland. Bank of Ireland got rid of their market making onto Davy Stockbrokers and AIB, in the middle of an auction, pulled out of market making, which I was furious over. And then when, you know, we were relying on foreigners to make the market in Irish Government bonds, apart from Davy's in Dublin, they were the only Irish ones that were doing it. But when I saw the amount of money that they had been lending to these other people and we were out, as I say, scavenging, looking for €100 million here and €100 million there to keep the ship of State afloat, I was flabbergasted by it. Now, admittedly we were not, we were paying as little as we could get away with, they were, the other boys must have been paying up or something. But, I found it absolutely astonishing, and by the way, these weren't to mega-companies or anything, these were frequently just to individuals or individuals who had formed themselves into a company.