Professor Alan Ahearne:

Well, the bank would've needed some capital but, again, if you thought that there was some value to be ... to come out of it, then there was an argument for giving you the capital ... the couple of billion of capital. I guess the issue was the reputational damage to this bank - whether it would ... it had a ... it would've had a franchise at all. The management felt that it could, that they could get something new out of it.

They’d even come up with a new name, "An Banc Nua", but I just didn’t see ... it would be the old Anglo, and I couldn’t see how it could play a role. Also, banking is about expertise and lending experiences. The expertise that they would have had would largely have been in lending to commercial ... in often the case, highly speculative properties so I just didn’t see how this would ... how this would fly.