Professor Patrick Honohan:

Actually, it is not. I am surprised that the Nyberg report said that because my understanding is that the Central Bank was in favour of introducing resolution legislation and that this was discussed earlier in 2008, and indeed that all of the policy people in the Department of Finance and the Regulator were in favour of this at the time it could be unconstitutional because the issue of property rights came up. That is not an empty - I am not saying it is fatal. I do not think it was just used as an excuse. Resolution legislation was introduced but not as drastic as some resolution legislation which would actually remove property rights in a more aggressive manner. Although we do have resolution legislation, it is not as dramatic as it might be. The British authorities brought in a very complicated piece of legislation in January 2009. They started in September, or whatever it was of 2007 and they got it enacted in January 2009. It is not as if we could have lifted something off the British statute book, tried it out on the Constitution and had it ready before September 2008. It would have been better if it had been there. There was a sense, certainly from Brian Lenihan, that we do not really need that because we nationalise. The thinking was never how do we impose losses on creditors of banks, it was how do we protect the banks from stopping functioning? His idea of nationalisation and that then confidence will return was taken without sufficient regard to the possibility that perhaps we would want to separate part of the liabilities of this bank into an entity which would be one down and losses would go where they had to go.