Professor Patrick Honohan:

This is what one might have been able to have ready if there had been resolution legislation in place. Then one could have said that in a failure the first people to be hit after the subordinated debt holders would be the senior bondholders, or some such category of creditor, and then afterwards the depositors. There is nothing holy about depositors relative to bondholders. Some of these banks had deposits of hundreds of millions of euro from international entities, so a distinction between depositors and bondholders was not clear precisely because they were pari passuin law. Somebody could say they would take a bond or that they would put it as a deposit. It did not make much difference to them. That is why I was saying that we should not demonise the bondholders. In that environment they are pari passu.