Professor Patrick Honohan:

One thing it is important to bear in mind is that Anglo Irish Bank was not only kept going for four and a half years after the guarantee but there was also for a while a plan to have a new business bank come out of it. One option was to nationalise and then more than nationalise - nationalise and deal with it, wind it down, transfer deposits to one place and assets to another, or both, and so on. There was more than nationalisation envisaged in what I would have done. After the first week I would have said this was going nowhere; therefore, we would have to move the deposits to a different place. In fact, a lot of this is foreshadowed in the brief note of Merrill Lynch to which has been referred.