Ciarán Lynch (Cork South Central, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Okay. Thank you. Mr. McCarthy, I'll just deal with one or two issues and propose we might take a little bit of a break then. Mr. McCarthy, on ... Kevin Cardiff stated in testimony that a one-page draft guarantee document was produced on the night, this is the night of the guarantee, and it was copied and was circulated. So, I'll just bring up ... it's coming up there, Mr. Cardiff's statement, you'll see it there as the paragraph ... at the lower side of the page, it says, "In fact, the decision/press release went through, probably, a dozen drafts, each one mostly only a little different to the previous, before it was finalised." When this was discussed further with Mr. Cardiff, when he was before the inquiry, there was an engagement between Deputy Doherty and Mr. Cardiff which ... the transcript would read, Deputy Doherty speaking says, "Okay and the 12 drafts of the statement that you mentioned in your opening statement that were created, were any of them circulated or were they saved on your computer, or were they just ... was it an open file that kept continued to be edited?" and so on, to which Mr. Cardiff replied:

It was probably an open file. I was sitting at the computer of a guy called Joe Lennon who was one of the Taoiseach's advisers simply because his room happened to be next door. I think Joe or someone else was going in and out. I might have been in and out myself but that it was an iterative process.

Deputy Doherty then said "So none of those documents were ... none of those drafts were circulated at any time to the meeting ... any of [those] drafts?" To which Mr. Cardiff says: "Oh, no, they were all circulated at the meeting." So the 12 drafts found themselves in the room at every given stage. Do you know who produced this draft document right from the get-go and did you receive a copy and what eventually was done with the copy circulated?