Mr. Richie Boucher:

Again, we would been spending our whole time explaining. You know, if you were talking to investors and you're explaining rather than pitching - you're losing. I think we could have guaranteed, and I think that is evidenced by an area of my personal responsibility, when inadvertently due to the scrambling on the night, a subsidiary of ours, a licensed subsidiary, ICS, was left out of the guarantee. And I think it was an accident whatever happened. And the records we've disclosed to the committee would show that I, I urged other colleagues who had engagement with Central Bank and with the Government, saying we need to get ICS in. So that could evidence that, you know, even a small subsidiary under the blanket of Bank of Ireland, which was specifically guaranteed, that I felt that, you know, we could have a problem in ICS if all the other Irish banks were guaranteed and our subsidiary wasn't. So, I advocated. Once the guarantee became available, once it became a guarantee that we couldn't ... we couldn't operate systemically.

Our other competitors, Ulster Bank, the main competitor, had been, effectively, nationalised by the British Government, so the depositors had an implicit guarantee. Rabobank was a very strong retail banker, so I thought we would be dealing in an isolated capacity, but that was ... once the decision had been taken to systemically guarantee. And I think, at a little bit to go to Deputy Doherty's question, once the decision had been taken to have NAMA it's very hard to take out a systemic decision. Just as you're going into a spiral, you can make your choices, you can decide I'm not going to be do this, I'm going to do ... it is harder, and you can get sucked into a systemic issue as well.