Professor Patrick Honohan:

I think what happened was, first of all, they had never any experience for 100 years of any big banking problem, so there was something small in the 1970s. So you'd just ... I'd say every banker ... it wasn't part of their ... the potential that there'd be bankruptcies and they'd all lose their jobs. They may have thought, "Well, we're taking some risks here and things might go wrong, we might have a few years of bad profits and the stock prices might go down." But they just couldn't imagine, from the long history of stability, that anything really bad could go wrong. Secondly, everything was going so well in Ireland. We had the Celtic tiger period, people were flooding into the country, they would need houses and money is so cheap now that we're in the euro, it costs nothing. It makes ... so there was a kind of myth, a foundation myth of this bubble, which lots of people bought into. And then they thought, "Oh, and anyway, if anything goes wrong, well we have super risk control mechanisms. We have hired people with maths PhDs, and they have complicated models which show nothing can go wrong and we know...", and then they look across to USA, which was shovelling out money into mortgages. They look at Britain, shovelling out money into mortgages and it seems like, well, this is the way to go. So the just ... those were the influences that drove them. Why did they not dig deeper? I don't know. They all ... you've had them here, and they all feel bad about it, because they can't really understand why they didn't have a second guess and that nobody came to them in the way that says, look, there a number of checks you should be doing here and if the regulator is not doing it, you better be doing it. And anyway, they should have done it anyway, even if the regulator wasn't doing it.