Professor Patrick Honohan:

Now, the resolution Act that we brought in in 2010, okay, is ... is not as far reaching as it might be. So we have new resolution legislation coming down the track now in the light of the BRRD directive and that resolution can actually distinguish between ... between creditors and say "You're going to lose," and "You're going to lose more money than if we had proceeded towards a liquidation." At least, as I understand it, it can have that effect. The 2010 Act doesn't allow that. It's a very light kind of resolution power. The British power ... the British legislation was very complex. It was brought in ... British environment is a more complex financial environment. We could have adopted it and work was going ahead to bring in resolution legislation to ... if we're talking about 2009-2010, why was it not introduced sometime in the course of 2009? We weren't going to use anything like this while the guarantee was in place because to trigger a resolution of one of the institutions would have caused all the creditors, even the ones that weren't due to be paid for five or ten years, to come immediately knocking on the Government's door and say "You told us this was guaranteed. Pay us now." So everything was frozen in terms of restructuring banks or resolving them, so there was no need ... I ... and so I asked the Minister for Finance ... I said, "What about ... what about resolution mechanism?" He said, "Hold ... let's hold on that because it's ... it's only going to cause trouble and give us no benefit in that course." And I think then the fact that we were ... we introduced ... we ... the Government proposed and the Oireachtas voted, a piece ... an effective piece of resolution for what we needed to do very quickly in December 2010 shows the degree of preparation that was there. It was going to come in. So in that period 2009-'10, I think it was moot as to whether we had it or we didn't have it - we weren't going to use it until after the guarantee.