Mr. Alan Dukes:

Well, I addressed that in my opening statement. I can't be sure. The problem, as presented to the Government, as I understand it, in September of 2008 was a problem of liquidity in the banks. I think I said in my opening statement the question is: were the banks or was Anglo insolvent at the time? This is a pure guess, I have no scientific basis for saying it, but I think, you know, this is probably not too far from reality.

At the actual point at which the guarantee was given, I think it was probably the case that technically Anglo was solvent because the real damage to the asset values happened sometime after that, fairly quickly after that, and certainly from January 2009 on. But I would think that had the kind of examination that Senator O'Keeffe was talking about earlier on ... had that been done in advance of the bank guarantee I think the probability is that Anglo would still have been solvent at that point and I think the other banks would have been solvent by a bigger margin, if you like, at that point.