Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 17 December 2014

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Context Phase

Photo of Pearse DohertyPearse Doherty (Donegal South West, Sinn Fein)
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I ask this because, on page 79 of his report, Mr. Nyberg notes that if the authorities or the Government had wished to avoid immediately providing a broad guarantee, some of the funding options - which he had mentioned above - were available, although perhaps not easily, through buying time, even until the following weekend, and this would not have been an idle exercise. He mentioned that even a short window would not have been an idle exercise. There are questions over when it was that the State brought the liabilities upon itself. I have a reference here from the former Minister for Finance, the late Brian Lenihan, when he spoke in the Dáil on the Act which was passed on 2 October and said:


We have a guarantee of sorts, a moral undertaking given by the Government last Monday evening. We want it spelt out in black and white for the institutions concerned. That is the urgency in relation to the scheme.
We know the scheme was passed by the Houses of the Oireachtas on 17 October. In Mr. Nyberg's view, was there buying time or is it something that the commission just did not look at?