Professor Patrick Honohan:

With that information, they should have nationalised it. But I am not saying they should then have said "we are not going to pay a penny; this is just a wind-down liquidation situation". The wind-down liquidation situation becomes the thing to do only where one suddenly discovers it is going to be €35 billion or something like that. The problem is, and the reason this gets complicated, is one must think through what would have happened then. One nationalises it, puts in new managers, the old people are thrown out and one starts to evaluate it. There are a number of twists and turns that can be taken after that which were not available because the guarantee had been put in place.