Professor Patrick Honohan:

So I ... this is obviously a statement by the Minister to, to the Government to explain what he's proposing. But I think certainly the promissory note, the Anglo and INBS, a smaller case, but take the Anglo case, at the end of December 2009, the new management team, who were pretty strong people, had already assessed that the losses on their loan book were going to bring them below the capital requirements. So they said, "What are you going to do about that?" I said, well, you're going to have to bring the capital up to the capital requirements, for the reasons I've given in my opening statement, and you'd better go to your owner, Minister for Finance, and see what he's going to do about it. So he did provide a letter saying that the Government intended to do something like this. A lot of consideration was given to how that would be arranged and the promissory note mechanism was designed to achieve three or four objectives, only one of which it achieved, which was to make the bank ... bring the bank back to financial soundness. So it gave them something for nothing, which gave the bank something for nothing, in the sense of ... so it wasn't going to be remunerated, over time, from the profit and loss account of the bank. Well, no, wait a minute, I'm not sure that ... I'm overstating it there, because ... no, well that's not right, because the calculations would have shown that it was able to remunerate it over time. But it's not on a basis, on a basis of risk that the private sector would not envisage. So the calculation-----