Professor Alan Ahearne:

It was the country as a whole and it was coming through the banking system.

If one looked at Ireland borrowing from abroad, there was massive borrowing. The sovereign position was fine but it was Ireland as a whole. Usually that would ring alarm bells for the IMF, but the IMF does not care if, for example, Pennsylvania or California have a current account deficit. It does not even measure it because it is part of a currency union. Therefore, the whole issue of current account deficits, which would normally trigger alarms in the IMF and other observers, because we were now part of the euro area, one would no more look at Ireland's current account than one would look at Pennsylvania's.