Professor Patrick Honohan:

I, sort of, suspect that Brian Lenihan was casting around for a way of closing the political circle and somehow he would be able to ... There's another thing I said in the interview, I said it could be "a precautionary amount of money". He was hoping, "Maybe, I won't have to borrow it, it will just be precautionary." Of course, he knew that was off the table by that stage. I think he just hadn't found a way of communicating it so it obviously did political damage to him; that's for sure.