Professor Gregory Connor:

The ECB did not have in its functional mandate providing risky capital. That flaw in the system has been dealt with. I am not sure the ECB would have responded. We can see that it had a flawed system in the fact that it broke its own rules in providing risky capital to the Irish banks. Some of the capital provided through ELA was not liquidity funding, given that the banks were insolvent and, therefore, any funding was risky capital injection. Obviously, the banks had a Government guarantee, and that was how they allowed themselves to call it liquidity funding.