Professor Patrick Honohan:

Yes, and I recommended to Jean-Claude Trichet that he should not send such a letter. I thought it was a bad idea. I told him the letter would leak eventually which amazingly it did, about a year and a half later, I think, and then was subsequently published. Well, I'm not sure whether it exactly leaked, but the gist of it leaked. And I just thought it would, from his point of view, it would put the ECB in a bad light to appear to be making an ultimatum. Now he would claim that it was not an ultimatum, it was merely a statement of what necessarily had to happen. But it was inevitable that in the eyes of the recipient, or even more so in the eyes of the general public when they would read a letter, that it would look like an ultimatum. So I recommended against the letter. However, I also told him, "I don't think you'll need this letter because it is clear that we are going into the programme."