Professor Patrick Honohan:

Yes, so I'm ... and I do accept a degree of responsibility with this, because when I came in I also did not initiate that kind of loan by loan analysis because I was told ... first of all, the large loans have already been analysed to the extent ... by Pricewaterhouse and all those people, and the banks' data systems do not allow this sort of information to be gathered. And I probably took too much on trust that all of these international firms had been studying these things, and they must have squeezed as much information as was available out of them. Subsequently, when we engaged the other American consultants, BlackRock, they were very .. we were in a different world then of course, we were under the troika saying, "You do this and do that." And we spent, I can't remember the number but its disclosed, €20 million or €30 million to do that work on a scale which I hadn't really imagined. This is sort of new enough territory.

Funnily enough, in the early months in the job, I remember one of my counterparts in, well actually I can mention, it's the Swedish governor, he's a friend, he said, "I hope you're getting BlackRock." And I said, "Well we have some people." But I should have taken him more seriously because I didn't realise the ramping up of the detailed loan-by-loan analysis which they would insist on, and when insisted on it was possible to get that out of the banks. Some of the banks couldn't do it, but got enough of it to be able to do it. And BlackRock people did it and then I made sure that our own Central Bank people reverse engineered what BlackRock where doing, so now we can do it as well and we get quarterly drops.