Professor Philip Lane:

In September 2008, some numbers seemed to be floating about as to them possibly being insolvent. Relative to GDP, the scale of insolvency at that point was maybe within what the Irish Government felt it could handle in a worst-case scenario, but of course those estimates were way off once the property prices and GDP cratered in the rest of 2008 and throughout 2009. Solvency calculations in September 2008 were going to be very different from solvency calculations in September 2009, for example.