Mr. Pádraig Ó Ríordáin:

Well, Senator, it's a very good question. The reason is this. The Department of Finance ... we advise the Department of Finance. So if you take the Attorney General's office which did a really great job in respect of the entirety of the crisis, their job is to provide the legislation on the infrastructure. But in a crisis like this, there's a lot more to be done, essentially. So, for example, in terms of understanding, you know, banks' capital, their financial instruments, transacting with banks - so a lot of this is contractual as well - there's a lot of other legal work that needs to be done which the Attorney General's office wouldn't generally do.

In terms of our input in terms of the legislation that the Attorney General's office was producing, our job really was to say "Well, how does this work, you know, out in the banking world?" So, in other words, that we would bring the experience of how this would actually legally impact the banks, how ... you know, how the legislation could be drafted in a way that actually effected in practical ways, in the actual banks themselves and the banking sector, what it was that the policy needed to achieve.

There's also a question of resource. I mean, for example, you know creating that step plan in the ... and this was only the first week, but creating that step plan for nationalisation, what do you actually do, you know, when the legislation is brought in? Those types of tasks would not be tasks that the Attorney General's office would, generally speaking, do.