Mr. Brian Cowen:

Well, first of all, the first question is no, I hadn't my mind made up going into the meeting. But, as I said in my statement, we got ... we first of all, got an appraisal from the Central Bank and the regulatory authorities as to what was going on that day, and the level of outflows and all the rest of it. And then John ... John Hurley spoke as well on the ... sorry, the Governor of the Central Bank spoke, and he spoke in quite stark terms about where we were at and how serious the situation was. And that made a deep impression on me and it made a deep impression on everyone else that was listening to it as well, because suddenly you realised, you know, there are going to have to be some decisions made here pretty quickly, urgently anyway. So, that was ... that's all, I mean, he said it "seemed to him", one of two things, it seemed to him I had my mind made up, which I didn't, or that I was putting the baseline scenario against the guarantee. Well, obviously, in the midst of a crisis if the ... if you have ... you can't ignore the Governor of your Central Bank. The Governor of your Central Bank says this situation is very serious and we could ... and he had been an advocate of a guarantee. Now, he had said, in his own evidence, that he was ... he only came to that view, you know, as things developed. It wasn't his original view back, when he came back from ... from having been hospitalised. He was back around September. And, he said that in his own evidence, so it ... he came to that view himself, and when he came to that view, I said, well then, knowing the sort of man Mr. Hurley is, if he's coming to that view we are in as serious a situation as he says we are in. Finally, the other part of your question, we were not ... it was not the situation that Irish Nationwide was insolvent on that night. We were told and certified by the regulator that they were solvent. The problem with this ... the problem with this liquidity problem is that, you know, when is it illiquid or when is something becoming insolvent? These are arguments that you've been having with various people here before ye but I can only go by the advice that I get. And, in relation to previous, you know, indications of problems or issues that were coming up for banks, including those two that you're talking about, the ... the background to that was that we were being told it was well capitalised and that there were sufficient buffers to meet the situation. Now, when we put in Pricewaterhouse after 29 September, and they looked at all of these, all of the banks again, they came back and said ... certified them as being solvent. So, if we had that information before it ... if that was the information we were getting, would it have been any ... would it have made a substantive difference?