Mr. Brian Cowen:

I do believe that, based on the information we had available to us that night, that we had to avoid a run on the banking system in Ireland, and I believe that that decision we made provided us with the best prospect of achieving that. Now, I can't prove the counter-factual. I know what happened when we made that decision. When we made that decision money stopped going out and not only did money stop going out, money came back in and it stabilised the situation, as I said, bought time, for the ... for us to try and see in what way we could deal with, as you say, a banking system that had got probably too big, and ... and a banking system that was having real difficulties because of the, the property loans and the commercial property loans etc.