Professor Patrick Honohan:

Okay, so ... and this relates to ... I suppose to some extent to Mr. Trichet's interaction with the ... with the committee and so on and so forth. And I ... I spoke to Mr. Trichet some months ago, and maybe a year ago, because there was an article in the Irish Independent, maybe an interview with him or something like that, and he was ... I met him at a function and he was rather concerned that it was being portrayed that in some sense that the ECB had imposed a guarantee on Ireland ... that sort of area.

And, what he said to me ... he's a very consistent person. You know, you asked him four or five times different things and he gave the same answer, and he's very consistent. So even a year before he came, or some number of months, he said, "Patrick, the message I gave to Ireland was the same message as I gave to everybody, that we must stand behind our banks." And so, when I heard him say repeatedly in the Royal Hospital, "no message to Ireland, no special", what I understood, what I interpret him to be saying is, "no special message to Ireland." So I was telling them, we must all stand ... we must. So there's some bank in trouble in Ireland: "There are banks in trouble everywhere, we must stand behind our banks." So that's how I interpreted it, and that's how interpret even ... If you isolate one or two of the sentences that he said, it looks as if he didn't talk to Ireland at all, that he was busy in Brussels, or something like that, but that's not what he means. So I don't know the exact nature of the phone calls or whatever that he had. I don't know why I don't know, but I can't get to the bottom. He obviously can't remember who did he call at a particular moment exactly, but ... because there were lots of phone calls going on. I can't get to the bottom of exactly who called what when. If you listen to what Brian Lenihan said on the interview that he gave to Dan O'Brien and, at first sight, it seems as if he got a call from Trichet, and Trichet told him whatever he said - I won't read it because it's there. But then if you listen to it again, it says that Lenihan got a message on his phone from Trichet and he followed up on it and he got the message that was coming from Trichet. He doesn't ... never says he actually spoke to Trichet on that occasion so ... I don't know why we can't exactly disentangle exactly what was said at that point because it seems that it's rather innocent.