I see that Brian Cowen this morning reassured Northern Rock’s Irish customers that his British counterpart Alistair Darling’s reassurances about the bank’s solvency would also hold good for them. All the reassurance seems to have worked as the queues outside the bank’s branches in the UK have dwindled today and the bank is reporting most of the calls to its helplines are from people wanting to reinvest in the bank. That may well be the case and if so it is to be hoped the bank have learned some lessons from the last week’s debacle. Apart from everything else it is absolutely baffling that Northern Rock’s computer systems were so ill-equipped to deal with the volume of traffic to the site in recent days. If its main job over the last ten days or so has been to reassure customers that their money was completely safe, then a starting point may have been to get some extra servers in to allow those customers access their accounts. Seems to me that they have made a right pigs ear of the whole thing. I was going to say that if the bank’s share price fell any further, I’d be able to buy it myself but I see it has rebounded slightly this afternoon.