Professor Patrick Honohan:

All I will say about that is, and I think I was trying to be very careful in my May 2010 report which in general was quite critical of what had happened in September 2008. I am sure that Brian Lenihan, Minister for Finance, when he was setting the scene there and recommending what should be done was not in thrall to the financial markets or playing to their ... He was trying to protect the normal functioning of the Irish economy and employment and that was his goal in the actions that he took in September 2008.

I think it is easy for people to get trapped by saying "Oh the financial markets want this, the financial markets want that." But the truth of the matter is we do interact with ... we borrow, we borrowed large sums of money. And the financial markets are not just a single entity but they respond to the same impressions about whether they are going to get repaid or not and that is a reality which has nothing to do with or without democracy. It is to do with the way in which the world is interrelated in terms of trade, in terms of finance and borrowing and lending. If we want to shut ourselves out of that and become an autarchic society it will be a very poor society and that's not the choice that people make.