Anglo customers were moved from streets into backroom meetings 'to avoid making bank run worse'
It has been revealed that senior staff at Anglo Irish Bank believed it was doomed to collapse just days before the bank guarantee in 2008.
The banking inquiry has also heard that customers were ushered into offices during a full-blown run on the bank so as not to make the situation worse by having queues outside the bank.
Peter Fitzgerald, who was responsible for managing deposits at Anglo, told the inquiry there was a full-blown run in mid September 2008 after the collapse of Lehman Brothers as customers withdrew their deposits.
Mr Fitzgerald said: "We were moving customers that called to our savings branches off the street and into meeting rooms at the back of the building to avoid precipitating a crisis by people seeing a queue outside the bank," he said.
He said that in the days before the bank was guaranteed, senior staff were of the opinion the game was up and the bank would collapse.
This, he said, was because they had "no answer to the constant outflow of customer and wholesale deposits".
However, he insisted that on the night of the guarantee Anglo was solvent and that its problem was one of liquidity.
He also acknowledged the problems Anglo had caused the country, saying: "I fully understand that the actions of the bank can never be forgiven or forgotten and I would never look to defend them."
