Mr. Marco Buti:

When the crisis erupted, clearly a collapse of the banking system, which would bring down the whole financial system and the Irish economy, was an issue. Intervention by the Government was needed at the time in order to prevent such a collapse. We know this would have been catastrophic for the banks and the whole Irish economy, with an important contagion effect on the rest of the euro area. This does not mean that the intervention of the Government was perfect. It has been remarked that the blanket guarantee which was issued in 2008 was not a good idea. We were not notified of it. We knew it ex post. In retrospect, this was an excessive coverage of the banks.