Professor Patrick Honohan:

We are not meant to talk about individuals but we know who was there. He was not the senior politician. It was probably the weight of advice around him as well. There was a practical issue. This was a Monday night so what are you going to do? Have you got all the tools ready? Sort of, but it is going to be messy. I think he backed down from that with the expectation that: "We will struggle to the end of the week and then we can nationalise them". That was where he thought things would go but the guarantee was such a miraculous generator of inflows of funds that it was off the agenda - problem solved. So it was not done then; it was not done until three months later.

It was not obvious. What do you do when you have to nationalise a bank? Anglo Irish Bank caused us a lot of problems for several more years even though it was nationalised from the middle of January and INBS from a slightly later date.