Professor Patrick Honohan:

I do not dispute that this sort of thinking could happen. In the particular instance given, I doubt if DEPFA needed to play that card. I doubt if it needed to say to anybody "By the way, do you know who is on our board?" or anything like that. Getting a big bank, a credible bank, a formerly State-owned bank like DEPFA into the IFSC would have been seen as a great plus for the development of the Irish financial services industry. The IFSC would have wondered what it needed and thought yes, that sounds safe enough so let us go ahead. I agree that those effects are possible but I do not think I would like to suggest that they were relevant. I have no idea but I doubt that they were relevant.