Professor Gregory Connor:

I do not know exactly what documents the Government was looking at. That is something this committee will have to tease out. We know that the advice from the Financial Regulator was poor and we know that from statements made in October to the effect that this was just a liquidity problem when that clearly was not the case. It was obvious at that point to many analysts that it was not a liquidity problem but a deep insolvency problem. I do not know exactly how bad the information provided to the Government was so that is why I have provided those caveats. That said, a thoughtful Cabinet meeting at that stage should have been able to see that Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Nationwide, at least, were insolvent, even with the poor information provided by the Financial Regulator. Maybe the information was so bad that the Government missed that but that is my opinion. I admit that it is speculative. I do not have the documents that the Cabinet had when it made that wrong decision.