Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Well, I can say that the Labour Party sought to ... as I think probably all of the different parties did, as the shock of the bank guarantee settled on that awful morning ... to do the right thing as far as was possible by the country, by the people, by the State and having been a consistent critic of various elements of finance in Ireland and of the banks in Ireland, it was my honest judgment, as it was the leader of the Labour Party then, Deputy Eamon Gilmore, that this bank guarantee was wrong and, in particular, I was aware of what had previously happened in Sweden where Mr. Nyberg, who subsequently, I think, came and visited committees in this House and said how the Swedes had approached it ... and it was never going to be possible to exit the problems cost free but we could have done it in a more effective way and we might have been in a position to have rescued the two big mainstream banks, high street banks, AIB and Bank of Ireland, in a less costly way. Now, mind you, we will now recover most of what we lent to them through-----