Brian Cowen (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail)

Has it been? I will answer the Deputy. On the first matter, the state of my knowledge at the time of the making of a guarantee was the advice I obtained on that night from the regulatory authorities, the Central Bank and the Department of Finance. The people who were dealing with Anglo Irish Bank in relation to liquidity issues were from the Central Bank. The people dealing with Anglo Irish Bank or any other financial institution in relation to regulatory requirements were from the Irish Financial Services Regulatory Authority, IFSRA. They have been given statutory independent authority by this House under statute to deal with those issues. Those are the people who were dealing with this.

It is clear from the reports which have emanated from Regling and Watson and Professor Honohan that the analysis and assessment of the situation by those authorities who were responsible for interfacing with the financial institutions was based on the regulatory system in place at the time, which was replicated in other EU countries and other parts of the world. It is clear that we had systems failures in relation to those matters, as set out dispassionately in the reports which this Government and the Oireachtas sought in terms of getting an overview of what happened, what went wrong and how it went wrong. It is all in the report. However, that does not stop Deputy Ó Caoláin coming in here to give his version of events, which is to suggest that I had not taken the advice given to me. Various advices were given and various options needed to be considered. What was clear on the night in question, which I have been trying to get across to the Deputy for two years now, is that we faced the prospect of systemic failure with not one institution but the whole system going down. That required a response that would return confidence to the markets. That is the reason we gave the guarantee we gave.

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