Mr. Brian Cowen:

Well, obviously, they had that concern and, you know, he was putting forward their concerns and I was explaining why we had to do what we had to do. They had done things themselves and everyone was trying to handle their own national situation as best they could. I mean, during the debate in the House on the actual guarantee itself, you know, clearly, there were banks in Ireland who were making this point and it was being articulated in the Dáil debate - there is nothing wrong with that. People were saying, "Are you sure you have to leave .. how are you going to handle that aspect of the situation?" And we, obviously ... Brian Lenihan discussed all this with the banks concerned and, at the end of the day, they made a decision not to come in on the guarantee scheme because of the conditions we would have had to set for them to do so. Because one of the things you have to bear in mind is that a subsidiary here of a very large bank in the UK, you know, you'd want to have a very clear view as to what was their situation going into a guarantee and make sure that other aspects of the activity wasn't coming back in through the subsidiary, if you know what I mean.

So, you know, we ... I simply said to him that we would continue to work with those who had concerns but that we had a national interest that we had to protect and we were doing so in as broad a way as we could, without taking on more ... we were already taking on a lot in a contingent liability without taking on anymore. So, you know, it was a civil and appropriate conversation. There was nothing untoward about it at all. They had concerns, it was their job to communicate those concerns to us, and we were saying, "We'll be mindful of those as we move forward over the next few days trying to get an EU state aid approval for what we've decided to do."