Mr. Martin McGuinness:

I would not have any doubt whatsoever that the business community in the North, particularly those members of it who were going to be affected by this, were undoubtedly raising concerns at constituency level with all sorts of elected representatives. At the same time, at that early stage it was quite obvious that we were dealing with the Minister, Deputy Noonan, who was very appreciative of the difficulties in the North and that the prospect of a fire sale could lead to detrimental economic damage to us, as an institution. From that perspective, obviously people were very interested. This was a huge issue that had a very dramatic impact on the business community, but all of that was prior to the sale of Project Eagle and at that stage the Minister did everything in his power to reassure the Northern Executive that he was going to be very sensible about how this would be handled, given that he was also dealing with an organisation, namely, NAMA, which was independent but at the same time we were all very conscious that on such a serious matter there would have been regular discussions between Frank Daly and the Minister.