Mr. Brian Cowen:

Well it wasn't that we were unaware of the fact that these were factors that were playing on sentiment of the markets at the time. We weren't unaware of that. The problem was being able to accurately evaluate where all this was going to end up. And that was a big problem. So ... and the efforts that we were making both before and after the guarantee decisions, was about trying to get more information, more of what we thought would be accurate information. But as you know, as the markets situation was, you know ... this was a moving matrix every time you looked at it as far as I could see. That you had a situation where we had to put in capitalisation ... recapitalise for the purpose of meeting market requirements for capital ratios, that was the first thing. Then by spring of that year when we got into the NAMA process or got into a NAMA-type decision - set that up administratively. Get into the business of getting full co-operated in the banks to get into the case-by-case state of the loan books. You know all of this. The disadvantage of it was it was taking time to do that. But at the end of the day when it's all boiled down, the only way you could be sure of where you stood in all this was to do a case-by-case assessment and spend that time.

As you said before, as I think was said before, you know, going into the Dáil with a policy proposal such as this, you know, quite rightly the Opposition and the Government representatives or Government Deputies would be saying, "Well what are we talking about here, what sort of scale are we ... do we envisage?". And you'd then give your best guesstimate at that point. And of course that doesn't prove right but once you put that out there then that becomes a benchmark, and if it's over that you're criticised, but if you don't give the information you're wrong as well. You know what I mean? You're trying to get your handle around a very, very big problem. Get your arms around a very big, very big problem very quickly. So on the one hand, you know you must have due diligence, clearly, and on the other hand people want information that when they're being asked to support legislative proposals that they have a good idea what it is they're being asked to support.