Professor Patrick Honohan:

It is not fair to my predecessor to say what I would have done. Moreover, it is very hard to say what I would have done. However, on the specific question of whether all that sum of money could have been avoided, the straight answer is "No", it certainly could not all have been avoided.

Could it have been whittled down a bit more? Yes, I think so. A lot of whittling-down has been happening, with many public servants and others working very hard to whittle down that €64 billion, imposing losses eventually on subordinated debt holders and achieving other things. There has been a great deal of very sophisticated work, which has helped to bring it down, but it would have been very hard to avoid it all. We saw various points at which it was difficult to do things.

I mentioned two things specifically. One was subordinated debt. The sums of money involved there, for example in Anglo Irish Bank, were relatively small. All these numbers can be got precisely, but it is around the €2 billion mark and some of that was subsequently exchanged for lower amounts. The order of magnitude of that part is not great, but the reasoning given for guaranteeing subordinated debt was very weak. Nobody else guaranteed subordinated debt, so that could have been done-----