Ms Mary O'Dea:

It was ... it was absolutely crisis mode ... very much crisis management. My particular role was in relation to the consumer area and we were on the phone constantly to each other updating the information, because we had to very careful that the information we gave to consumers was exactly right. We couldn't simply say, in a trivial way, "Your money is safe". We had to actually say precisely what that means, precisely what was guaranteed. You'll recall the deposit protection scheme increased over that period of time, so we had to make sure we gave them that information very, very quickly.

And the other issue was, having seen Northern Rock, our focus on the consumer side was not on the wholesale run that others might've been looking at but very much on the possibility of a retail run, queues forming outside of a bank and what that might do in terms of a visual. So we were extremely worried about it and we were constantly ... we ... you know, we got a phone call to say, there was a photograph of a bank, you know, with two people standing outside, we'd immediately be on to say, "Please rectify the situation". And then, on the consumer information line, we had to pull staff to make sure that we could answer ... because a phone ringing out would send a really signal. So we had outsourced that service but we had to make sure we increased our capacity in relation to doing that.

And then, the other issue I remember is, on the day after the guarantee, we had about 15,000 visits to the website. So nowadays, of course, a lot of people get their information from the website ... 15,000 people ... we'd 1,000 calls ... and again, we were ourselves trying to understand precisely what the guarantee meant for consumers and we had to portray that information in an accurate way. So it was continuous, really, all through 2008 and into 2009.