Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 29 April 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. Eugene Sheehy:

We didn't propose anything. We gave advice on ... in response to questions we were asked. We said we needed a guarantee, the system needed a guarantee of some type, because of what had happened that day and what was absolutely certain would happen over the coming days. And after that then for instance, when it came to the duration, there was a one-year duration proposed. The way the markets operate one year is actually a product, you know, 90 days is a product, there are buckets of time-based funding instruments and one year is one year for one day. It just becomes technically very difficult to do anything with a one-year guarantee, so we recommended a two-year guarantee and subsequently the European Commission came out and said that that was the only type of instrument that would have had a chance of working, less duration would not have worked.