Brian Lenihan Jnr (Dublin West, Fianna Fail)

While I do not state I am minded to do this, were I to give a public direction to the pension fund to invest further in the three credit institutions, of necessity, the market then would infer that the pension fund would immediately need to dispose of an amount of its shareholding. That is a commercially sensitive operation and that constitutes market sensitive information. The Deputy is asking me to accept this amendment and disclose to the markets in advance, through a Parliamentary debate, that such a direction should be given. That is not possible.

To get around that problem, Deputy O'Donnell postulated an entirely different set of circumstances, as did Deputy O'Shea, in which somehow I would transfer funds from the Central Fund into the pension fund and then direct the pension fund to make an investment in a credit institution. I accept this is theoretically possible but this could only be done in the public domain because of the scale——

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