Professor Patrick Honohan:

Well, first of all, they didn't have the power to direct Ireland to enter a programme. The idea of Ireland being in a programme was extremely live from the start of September 2010 and we'll get into this in the afternoon in more detail. I remember when we were in Washington in early October for the IMF annual meetings, one of the topics was that resources of the IMF. Do they have enough money to lend? And the example explicitly was given, for example, for Ireland. Oh, we didn't apply for anything so and then when Brian Lenihan and myself and other colleagues met the IMF country team, we discussed in quite a lot of detail what would a programme look like. So Brian Lenihan was very interested in this. So it's completely hypothetical and then I remember meeting with the secretary, the deputy secretary or Under Secretary of the US Treasury because, again with Brian Lenihan, Dr. Brainard and she ... we were explicitly talking in hypothetical terms. I think Brian Lenihan started talking about a programme and if I'm remembering rightly now I said, "Of course, this is entirely hypothetical." But this is early October so it was very, very much in the air and Brian Lenihan's view was I think that he needed time to prepare the ground for a major fiscal adjustment, which would be part of the programme, and he couldn't be rushing into a programme if he didn't have that time. And then he was being told by these officials from the outside, "You don't have time; the markets will not give you political time."