Mr. Peter Nyberg:

In one way or another the Government had to assure the markets that the Irish banks were solid enough to be lent money as before. If there was no guarantee, how would that have been done? It is not clear. The end result is what matters here. Should the Government have made a banking holiday or whatever? I do not know. The legal basis for more sophisticated solutions, resolutions and so on was not there. There was nothing that could be done on that basis.

I remind Deputy Doherty that during the night, there were several discussions on alternatives, such as giving a shorter guarantee, reducing the scope of the guarantee and so forth. For various reasons which are not documented but can, no doubt, be outlined by those who were there, these alternatives were not considered realistic. In the end, after looking at these issues, this was what came out. It worked fine at first but as it turned out that the problems were bigger than foreseen, the efficiency of the measures was reduced in the eyes of the market.