Dr. Michael Somers:

Why we chose Merrill? Well, my colleague, John Corrigan, whom, I think, you are seeing next week, he looked around to see who could we get that wasn't already conflicted because the Irish institutions had all hired their own advisers, etc., and the only ones that had not been hired for something were Merrill Lynch and there was some difficulty in trying to get Merrill's. And we ... for whatever reason, I seemed to contact Bill McDonough about it who had been president of the New York Fed and he was able to put some pressure on them. Anyway, they came in. It wasn't a question that we had a huge choice. They were the only ones. Now, why was it done in such close proximity to the guarantee? Well, when we hired them, we didn't know that guarantee was going to arise. I mean, I had no idea that weekend that this crisis was going to suddenly arise on Monday because, as I said, John Corrigan and I, we were booked on a 10.30 flight on Monday morning out of Dublin. We could very easily have cancelled that but we had no indication in the wide earthly world that this was ... I mean, there was a crisis every week but so what?