Professor Patrick Honohan:

Now, when I say "guaranteed", it wasn't a good enough guarantee, I'd say, for the ECB to be really comfortable about it, but we had various ... we had securities from the various banks and, by that stage, I think they were all in ELA. They were good quality securities and we took them at ... we allowed them only a very steep haircut on their nominal value, so there'd be bundles of loans. But that would be the first line of defence for us but, in addition, we had a letter from the Minister for Finance. And this had been a practice that was established before I arrived and it would have been in anticipation of an ELA. It was a decision that had been taken in 2007, how they would do this thing - that the Minister would write a letter saying that it would be his intention to seek Government approval and Oireachtas sanction, or whatever it was, for the moneys, if it turned out that they failed. Now ... so, it was a ministerial guarantee, but it wasn't binding; it wasn't part of Ireland's debt.

It wasn't binding in the same way. It was like a political guarantee rather than a legally binding one.