Mr. Brian Cowen:

Again, I don't think it's an accusation. I think it's ... if Professor Honohan says that Brian said ... characterised it in that way to him at some time later, maybe a good time later, well I'm not going to question what Professor Honohan said. If that's ... if he said Brian said that to him, I accept that's what he said to him but I've explained in my statement the context of that when I was there. It wasn't a question of me dictating ... overruling or anything. The two of us were trying to grapple with a very serious problem. There were a number of issues that were being narrowed down to a couple of issues and one of them was whether we would nationalise or not. Now, there's pros and cons with that decision. It's not saying ... you can't say one is 100% right and one is 100% wrong. You're trying to work it out and what I was saying was ... and, in fairness to him, as Kevin Cardiff put it, that he spoke to Brian about it subsequently, probably sooner than when he spoke to Mr. Honohan about it, he said he felt that we needed to come to a common position on it, which was true, we do ... we did need to come to a common position on it. And I ... I said to him, "Look, you know, I'm not saying ... I'm not ruling out the idea that at some stage in the future we might have to nationalise a bank - it's not that I have an ideological problem here with nationalising a bank." That's not ... and, in fact, when it came to having to nationalise the bank, we nationalised the bank. I'd no objection to doing that once we had gone in and done a sort of a ... we weren't doing it off ... you know, they were doing it on the basis that this was what we now had to do. It was a last resort - there was no other option. Because before ... so that's the first point. The second ... so, you know, he's reassured on that point, obviously.

The second point is that I was making the case that a nationalisation, you know, as we know, when you do nationalise a bank, it doesn't ... it doesn't ... it's not the panacea, it doesn't solve all the problems. You take on all the assets and liabilities onto the State's book immediately. Now, I am aware, of course, that the other option, which takes on a contingent liability, is also very high. But my view was that a temporary time-limited support mechanism was better than an open-ended support mechanism for one of them and a time-limited support for the rest because, what that might say is ... the market ... I mean, remember now, this is a volatile ... very volatile situation in the markets. It's like ... you're talking about Wall Street 1929 stuff, no one knows where anything is going. I'd say, it could be ... it could be interpreted ... it may or may not be, but it could be interpreted that you've identified something and it's going to spread further and you're going to have more nationalisation. So, really, it's ... it's ... it's ... you know, I'm not suggesting I'm correct or right or any more correct or right than anyone else. It was a political judgment that we were trying to come to as to what was the best thing to do in the circumstances.