Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

It is very strange that a series of events was triggered by Anglo Irish Bank people going to Bank of Ireland and telling them Anglo was facing insolvency and that this caused both Bank of Ireland and Allied Irish Banks to come rushing down to Government Buildings to talk about the banking crisis without ever mentioning that Anglo Irish Bank faced insolvency. Did the two banks not tell the Taoiseach what they believed to be the case? Did Bank of Ireland people not tell the Taoiseach that they had been told that Anglo Irish Bank faced insolvency? Did the Taoiseach never raise the question of Anglo Irish Bank's solvency? That seems strange, because a few days previously, according to the documents that have been provided to the Committee of Public Accounts, the then Secretary General of the Department of Finance appeared to be in that territory. The note of that meeting stated that Mr. Doyle noted that the Government would need a good idea of the potential loss exposures within Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Nationwide and that on some assumptions the exposure of Irish Nationwide could be €2 billion after capital and that of Anglo Irish Bank could be €8.5 billion.

A number of days before the meetings on 29 September, senior Government officials were certainly in insolvency territory in their discussions. Incidentally, according to the list of attendees at that meeting, the Taoiseach was present at it. It is very strange that in circumstances where senior Government officials were talking about solvency issues in Anglo Irish Bank, where that bank had gone to Bank of Ireland and said it faced insolvency and where Bank of Ireland and Allied Irish Bank people came rushing down to Government buildings in crisis mode, that they would not have shared that information with the Taoiseach. Is that what the Taoiseach is telling us?

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