Professor Alan Ahearne:

To be honest, I have an open mind. I just do not know. I might be able to come to a better opinion at the end of the inquiry when more information has come in. I just do not know.

I heard that Governor Honohan had a footnote in his report in which he talked about an alternative scenario in which Anglo Irish Bank was not included in the guarantee but was put under some sort of administration. That is an interesting hypothesis, but it was only a footnote in a report. I have not seen a ten- or 20-page paper that goes through that in a counterfactual manner explaining how it would have worked - that the next morning the Government would have announced this, that excluding Anglo Irish Bank would have affected things in a particular way or that it would have worked in a particular way. Without seeing a worked-out scenario and a detailed paper, it is just a hypothesis at the moment. It is a footnote in a report, so I do not know.