Brian Cowen (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail)

If Deputies have a problem with that, they have a problem with the Governor and the authors of the other reports. Those are the facts. We obtained EU approval for those guarantees. There was no existing European system at the time. We had to act in the national interest, and it has been confirmed subsequently that some banks would have had to close their doors in a matter of days had the guarantee not been established.

Other countries have introduced similar State guarantee schemes to deal with their banking systems. Governments throughout the world have had to intervene due to the impact of the financial crisis. To suggest that Ireland, uniquely, would have been immune is to refuse to face the facts. Yet it continues even now, after all that has been said and written about the crisis by those who examined the facts. We subsequently recapitalised the banks because we needed to do so, and then we segregated the distressed assets and parked them in the National Asset Management Agency.

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