Professor Patrick Honohan:

Well, they are two very different questions. I wasn't kept very closely informed of what they were doing because ... and, in fact, the governing council, and this is true for all the programmes, the governing council of the ECB, which is my interaction with the ECB machinery, it does not examine the details of the programmes and minimum wages and, you know, social welfare payments and tax rates. None of that is discussed by the ECB governing council. The ECB is somewhat distant from the negotiations but, of course, it's a powerful figure because it holds the purse strings on the banking system.