Professor Alan Ahearne:

It was something that they wanted to do. I mentioned that it made sense in ... I mean, there weren't huge benefits to it. In fact, the benefits were probably quite small, but they wanted to do it. One benefit was that it did put the two banks that were being wound down together and, in a way, created a separation between them and the other banks. I thought that was probably helpful. And there was a transfer of deposits then from Anglo to AIB. The country needed the deposits, it needed the funding, but the funding really needed to be in the banks, the core banks that were going to continue, not in banks that were going to be wound down. So that made sense to me.