Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 8 July 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Photo of Pearse DohertyPearse Doherty (Donegal South West, Sinn Fein)
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Okay. Can I go to ... can I go to David Doyle's testimony to the banking inquiry, on page 115, and David Doyle, under questioning by myself, talked about there was a consideration that illiquidity would rapidly become insolvency, this is on the night of the guarantee. But, I pushed him in relation to, setting aside that risk of an illiquid bank becoming insolvent, was there an analysis, from some financial institutions or others, that the bank themselves, given their loan losses, could be insolvent in the future? And he responded, and he says:

Well, that debate around nationalisation reflected the concern that there could be a problem emerging. And if that problem emerged, that would damage the market.

So the argument that they should be nationalised related to the concern about the quality of loan book. Isn't that not the case, the reason why Minister Lenihan and Kevin Cardiff was arguing for nationalisation of the bank as opposed to a guarantee, is because they were concerned that there was loan losses within Irish Nationwide and Anglo Irish Bank, that a guarantee, while solving the liquidity problem, would not solve the loan losses that were emerging in those two institutions?