Professor Patrick Honohan:

ELA would always have been back stopped by Government undertakings, and so forth. It would not have been the case that the ECB would take the risk onto itself. It would be just buying time. This was seen as a liquidity problem; it should have been solved with a liquidity instrument. While one was solving it, one might ask whether this really was a liquidity problem and one could get the experts in to really take these banks apart. It took many more months before there was full clarity on the scale of the problem.