Professor John FitzGerald:

What I should have said was that we might have come through. At the time, if we had run it with a collapse in the rest of the world, we would certainly have seen it. I also said this was a cop-out because the numbers were available. We might have come through if the rest of the world had not collapsed; that is possible. Looking at the numbers now, we were in a really dangerous position, even without a collapse elsewhere and it is very possible that there could have been a collapse. The world economy had not collapsed on 17 March when Anglo Irish Bank was in difficulty and the ramification could have been that we had a really serious problem. The odds are that we would have had major difficulties even without an international collapse, but the international collapse triggered it. It happened much more rapidly.