Professor Patrick Honohan:

It has been woefully wide of the mark in terms of its predictive ability. It was naive in the description of the negotiating leverage that we had, very limited as it was. It was poorly informed in regard to the motivation of the players, the key players, and the behaviour of the key players. And I think it very badly misrepresents both the opportunities and the strategies of the Irish side, suggesting that there was some missed opportunity. There are all sorts of funny things about the piece. It doesn't really hang together. Now, it was a contrarian view, yes, but it was a contrarian view, in this case, after the event. Now, sometimes he was ... he was very much, you know, be careful, because this is happening. I mean, he made lots of important contributions on a number of issues, of course, the property lending, and the residential mortgages, that was, sort of obvious, but he ... that ... he was wrong on this, he was wrong also, as we know now, on the stress tests of 2014 on what was going to be used to damage the Irish business sector. And he also tries to present the Central Bank, or me, as being a great advocate of paying banks before everybody else, which I think is very, very unfair. I didn't do the guarantee. I tried to get as ... claw back as much as possible.

There was a crunch time for a decision on these issues in September 2010, when we were coming to the cliff. And that's why I included in my statement that footnote elaborately setting out what I thought about at the time, which was six months or eight months before he produced that article. So it wasn't as if we were just sitting there saying "Ah sure, everything's all right, oh, suddenly we're in a programme", no, we seriously considered this and we decided it was not safe to do something like this and that if there had to be a restructuring, it should be in a different environment later. And probably I did have, as I mentioned before, an idea that, you know, what ... the best way to restructure if it should become necessary, which it hadn't. And then he advocated, he explicitly advocated in the article, cutting public expenditure at a stroke. Well, that's like adding a super-charged austerity, an extra €30 billion or something of super-charged austerity ... like, why? Why did he want that? It doesn't make any sense. If he's going to be a defaultist, which in a way he was and in a way he wasn't, he was saying "Bankruptcy is disastrous", but he did want us to default on the guaranteed bonds; so it's hard to say whether he wanted it or not, well, you would not default before you had run the course of borrowing as much as was going, so ... and Brian Lenihan had no game plan for holding out for six months. And if he had, which he didn't, he could still have held out for six months, it was nothing to do with me.

And there was lots of stuff. He said that ... I had a look at it recently, so, because I knew, I think you mentioned it earlier on, and he said "This all comes down to arithmetic." Okay, that's true, I am very much in favour of that. He said, "In 2014 the debt of the Irish State will be €250 billion." Well, actually it was €203 billion and that's a difference. So, look, I have a lot of respect and a lot of time for Morgan Kelly. I was pretty annoyed with the article, as you can imagine, because it sort of undermined that we were working to save the State.