Professor Patrick Honohan:

I actually don't think they should have. If they'd managed to get the ECB on board, then they should have done it. And we know that even the governor of the Bundesbank ... the president of the Bundesbank was in favour of that and there would have been others as well. But it was the majority view in the ECB. So they hadn't sold the message ... doing it with ... against the views of the ECB would have caused ... cost more than the gain from that and certainly would have put paid to whatever happened later in the promissory note.