Professor Patrick Honohan:

Yes, so this is another interesting phone call which I took in Heathrow Airport in the place that you used to go down in the tube to the plane. So I got a call from Ashoka Mody, who we know was subsequently in here and he ... out of the blue he said "You know we're coming, we're coming later in the month for the Article 4." Yes I know. "And we're just wondering would you think Ireland would be interested in one of these precautionary programmes?" And I knew that ... there are a number of ... two particular precautionary programmes, I'm not sure which one he was talking about. One of them was for countries that were really considered very well run, very well managed but just vulnerable to pressure from the market. Mexico, I think, qualified for one of these and may have taken one of these ones. And I thought this might be quite good, we'd get a ... we'd get a seal of approval, potential access to money and it might be good. But I didn't think it as a wonderful thing which would have really been, you know, let's go for that, because if I had, we would have been advocating it as well.

I don't recall, perhaps you can tell me did I say in that paper that I actually spoke to the Department of Finance or did they speak to me? I think he ... I think he went on and raised it with the Department of Finance and somebody mentioned to me "Were you talking to Mody about this - it's not going to happen, no, no", something like that.