Brian Lenihan Jnr (Dublin West, Fianna Fail)

If Deputy Morgan will allow me a little time, I should have said in reply to Deputy Bruton that the PricewaterhouseCoopers report contains 120 pages on each financial institution, so it is a very long report and it was essential that I be briefed on parts of it. I worked my way through substantial parts of it and, to be honest, there were large parts of it which I wanted to forget because they contained details about individual customers of the relevant financial institutions.

I refer to the questions posed by Deputy Morgan. The Deputy should stop this business of saying that the bank should not have been nationalised. Whatever the future of the bank, it had to be nationalised to protect the stability of the financial system. There was no other option. If we had taken the course of action advocated by Deputy Morgan, that is, to immediately wind up the institution, Ireland would have immediately taken a hit of many billions of euro throughout companies, banks, individual customers, hospitals and credit unions.

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