Mr. Lar Bradshaw:

At 8.30 p.m. the night before I found out that Anglo Irish Bank was potentially involved in the funding of the senior debt. I am on the board of Anglo Irish Bank so now I have a perceived conflict. The following morning at the start of the meeting I declared I had a perceived conflict. I am going to say something that will probably drive you all mad but the truth of the matter is that I did not feel, and to this day I do not feel, that I had any actual conflict. A conflict of interest is where your judgment can be affected, that you come to the wrong conclusion because you have two different objectives. The truth of the matter, and I know you must get inside my head to figure what was going on, and I cannot prove that, but it is a statement that is 100% true, there is no way I would ever do anything to influence a decision in the authority because I had either some other interest or some other involvement. I just would not do it. I accept absolutely, however, that there was a perception and I announced that conflict because I am on the board of Anglo Irish Bank. I am non-executive director of the bank, there are eight meetings a year and I would never, nor did any board member, get involved in individual decisions. I did not pay any attention to who the clients of the bank were, that was not my role as a non-executive director. That is not what it was about but I declared it. The way I thought about it, and I can only tell you the way I thought about it, we had a big discussion about it.

There were three issues in that meeting. As I thought about the potential perception of a conflict of interest, the first issue was would we do a joint venture and would we bid for this site. The second issue was what the final bid price would be that we would agree to. The third issue was how we would fund it, the bank that would fund it, the terms, the margin, the duration and the security and so. Those are the three issues.

On the first issue, we had already decided we were going to pursue this joint venture for many good reasons you are very familiar with. That decision had already been made.

On the third issue, the bank that will fund it, I would obviously exclude myself from any such discussion.

That leaves the other issue, the final bid price that all will agree to. We had held that discussion on the 20th and had agreed that we would go to €375 million but we needed to revisit it and make ourselves comfortable with it. We than had a conversation with Bernard McNamara on the 23rd and he agreed that anything over €375 would be at his risk, which was fantastic to have achieved on our part, with no dilution of our 26% shareholding. Then I started thinking whether we would raise our bid price, leave it as it is or how we would feel about it. My view was that for a big decision - which I know with hindsight we got wrong - for the authority it would not be right for three board members to leave that to the other board members. I never shirk from taking decisions and I felt it would be a dereliction of duty.