Professor Patrick Honohan:

It's hard to understand his motivation. He may have been under pressure from some of the governors - I don't know, they wouldn't have spoken to me - that they were just looking, in a very narrow way, on the growth of ELA and the prospective growth of ELA and they thought this is something that needs to be brought under control - or he may have been motivated by observing what Brian Lenihan was responding ... in the Eurogroup - Trichet, I think, would have been at that meeting, I'm pretty sure he was at that meeting, he would have seen Brian Lenihan saying, "No, no, no", to people who were asking him to go for the programme. So he was probably discounting the information he was receiving from his own staff, the technical staff that had negotiated ... they saying, "Oh, the negotiations are going fine", he probably said, "Well, that's not what I saw in Brussels and also I'm under pressure from some governors who don't like the way things are going." Some combination of that. It seemed unnecessary and behind the curve to me.