Professor Patrick Honohan:

It is all a question of tone and what one decides to include or not. There are always matters of judgment. Obviously, I would not endorse the judgment. Hunting down some particular research paper that said something pessimistic is not a good way of going about these things. Fortunately in my organisation there are many people, researchers and analysts, with different views. We have vigorous arguments and they are encouraged to challenge senior staff members. We have those debates. The people who are too optimistic or too pessimistic who do not get their way may 20 years on say that when a particular fellow was in charge he would not allow anything to happen or was too liberal on something but that he or she wrote a paper on it. That does not mean they were right, although they might have been. We have to be careful about implying that just because somebody in the Central Bank said something it was right.