Professor Alan Ahearne:

I mean, the Minister was pushing for, I think right up until – get my dates right – certainly the week of say 22 November – there was still a lot of work being done by the Minister and I think by officials on how we could do this. A lot of it was legal work because there were big legal issues involved. Later that week, or maybe the weekend, I was speaking with the Minister and he said there’d been a conference call, I think ... I understood it was a G7 conference call, but it may not have been, but it obviously involved sort of people at that level, and that it had been decided that the burning of bondholders had been vetoed. ECB was against it. That was relayed to me. The European Commission sided with the ECB and as the Minister put it, although the IMF staff themselves individually, and from earlier on had viewed this as a good idea, the organisation, at the executive level, took a decision not to do it and, therefore, ultimately the troika’s position on this was that there’d be no programme would be available if this route was taken.