Professor Patrick Honohan:

Our subsequent experience - and we will presumably deal with that in the later part of the inquiry - was that the ECB was not in a frame of mind to permit wind-downs which imposed losses on senior bondholders. This is not a slam dunk, easy decision. The ECB would have said "If you want some assistance on this, please address yourselves to the other governments in Europe" because central banks can only give liquidity assistance. It would have allowed the granting of the ELA for a week or several weeks but------