Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

This question arose because the Minister issued a blanket guarantee at the end of November before the budget on Anglo Irish Bank exposure to interest rate and foreign exchange transactions. The reason it became necessary, which may have been recommended to the Minister by the board of NAMA, was that Anglo Irish Bank went down to junk bond status and many of the derivative positions essentially became closed.

Based on what the Minister knows about the operations of Anglo Irish Bank before the fall, and in view of the kind of behaviour the bank was engaging in, what does the Minister know about the derivatives it had entered into? The derivatives of most Irish banks were related to hedging, foreign exchange swaps and so on - routine business. It is basically a form of insurance. Then there were the geniuses who ran Anglo Irish Bank. If one is clever in the markets, there is a lot of money to be made from derivatives.

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