Professor Patrick Honohan:

I never got to exactly the bottom of why the suspicion grew that some ... that they were going to suffer from the Irish situation ... exactly what they perceived. Did they perceive that Ireland was going to heedlessly increase its indebtedness and not adjust at all and lead to a great crisis or do so deliberately or were they just surprised at what they hadn't noticed? I remember another person saying to me, "Why did you have to buy all those loans at these knockdown prices ... the NAMA loans? Why did you have to weaken your banks in that way?" So they were grasping at reasons how there had been a loss, because Ireland had this image of being so well run, and then that was suddenly, drastically looking under suspicion, but, turned around later.