Cowen set up secret group to plan guarantee

Then taoiseach Brian Cowen set up a “secret” group to examine a possible bank guarantee months before it happened — and as bankers and billionaires were actively lobbying for the move.

The situation was revealed during a five-hour meeting of the banking inquiry which also heard that banks tried to impose a far more wide-ranging guarantee which would have left them “laughing at us” and that Ireland was “pushed quite hard” by the ECB into the November 2010 bailout.

Speaking at the inquiry after his evidence was leaked days earlier, the former secretary general of the Department of Finance, Kevin Cardiff, gave the clearest picture yet of what happened in the lead-up to and on the night of the bank guarantee of September 29, 2008.