Professor Patrick Honohan:

You'll have to ask the troika that. The €10 billion was a sort of round number sum. They wanted to ... as we talked about that this morning, they had the idea they were really focused on the banks: the banks, the banks, the banks. "If we get the banks recapitalised, Ireland's problems will be solved because Ireland's problems are caused by the banks." So they said, "Why don't you recapitalise them right away?" And we said, "No, we did our sums, you've looked at our sums and you don't see any methodological flaws in them so, you know, we think we know what capital is needed. We admit they could do better with more capital and the market would trust them." So it was a sort of compromise round number figure; put in €10 billion, anyway, and we leave €25 billion in reserve and you can put the rest of that in if needed when the stress test is carried out. So it seemed like a reasonable compromise. In the end we put in, what, €17 billion instead of €10 billion.