Mr. Paul Gallagher:

Firstly, and I'm sorry, it's a question that Deputy O'Donnell raised, there was no issue that night, nor was any legal advice sought, on the ranking of depositors and senior creditors. And the reason was that it wasn't a legal issue about burning, because of course they didn't want to burn the senior creditors, they wanted the senior creditors to provide liquidity to the banking system. So that wasn't an issue at all.

What was made clear, consistently, is that if you wanted to differentiate between and senior creditors and the depositors, you would have to change the law. That was not without complication, but I believed it could have been done. Interestingly, when the Europeans brought in what is now the legal obligation, in the 2004 directive, they don't distinguish between the depositors and senior creditors, as such. The eligible deposits are protected, but depositors and senior creditors, as such, are not differentiated against, and the critical limitation on burning there was that nobody should be worse off than they would be in a liquidation situation.