Professor Patrick Honohan:

Yes, and I thought the only way of focusing attention on this is to put a number. Even though it's a wide range and there must be massive uncertainty about it because you hear witness after witness saying "We could have done this but it would have cost a lot." Well, hello, what was done cost a lot, so let's get quantitative about this and say how much more, is it actually plus or a minus? And, you know, I'm sure lots of people could challenge those numbers. Why did the numbers work out so low? Partly because the scenario that I'm describing, this is a scenario where you actually knew the losses that were embedded in the banks and you decided to ... try to go for broke and you threaten the ... we don't threaten but you say "Oh, we're really go to bail in everybody here." While there are a lot of decision trees that happen after that, you have to see what are they going to say. Well, they might say "Don't do that". They will say "Don't do that". But then they say "Will you risk share with us?" Well, what will that lead to? They'll say "Oh, yes, don't worry, we'll look after you, we'll give you ELA, don't worry." So, you're not quite sure what you will get. You might in the end say "Well, actually we won't bail them in. That was just a bluff and we won't bail them in." If you did bail in, I agree with the witnesses that have said that would be extremely costly in economic disruption and it might cost you €20 billion, easily €20 billion. How would you get to €20 billion? Well, for example, if GDP fell by an additional 2% and then it stayed 2% lower for a couple of years and then gradually got back to the path, very quickly, you've got €20 billion there. So, it's quite ... you lose a lot of what you seem to save by not paying these people that you don't want to pay. Also, some of the people ... let me say, oh, the bondholders - Irish credit unions, obviously, it's not going to be mostly, no.