Brian Lenihan Jnr (Dublin West, Fianna Fail)

He said:

Closure of all, or a large part, of the banking system would have entailed a catastrophic immediate and sustained economy-wide disruption involving very significant, albeit extremely difficult to quantify, social costs, reflecting in particular the fundamental function of the payments system in a modern economy.

These costs would have been broad-based in terms of income, employment and destruction of the value of economic assets and would have been on top of the recessionary downturn which has actually occurred.

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