Professor Patrick Honohan:

Yes, I suggested that to a couple of influential people in Frankfurt, but also to the troika people. They said, "You know that's a very interesting idea but forget it, we don't have a mandate to do that, the IMF doesn't do that. The FSF doesn't have it in it's mandate." I suppose what I thought was that maybe negotiations would go on for longer so that we could say, "Well it's not in your mandate now for the EFSF but why don't we develop that." But, you know, it just was too far out of their realm.