Mr. Brian Cowen:

Yes. Yes, I mean, all of us were surprised. I mean, the Minister for Finance employed Mr. Bacon to assist him in dealing with the next part of the problem which was: how do you make sure that banks continue lending?

And one of the ways you do that is you look at the options with how you deal with the non-performing, or the non-performing loans as you'd call them, or the loans that weren't being repaid, what do you do with those? How do you get a valuation method in place that would be accurate ... reasonably accurate... so that if you did go then that road, that whatever further responsibility the State was taking on to deal with those assets in order to make sure the bank got back to some sort of a functioning system to support the economy in some way, how could you make sure that you could accurately forecast the real valuation of those in the context where the market wasn't working and where you're going to avoid fire sales obviously and do this over a period of time? And I think that the work that he did was very helpful to the Minister and to the Government in coming to the decisions we came to.