Professor Alan Ahearne:

So in August, I guess, and certainly in September and October, there was a huge amount of international investors or potential investors visited Ireland. These were people involved in pension funds and insurance companies who would be buying ... you would like to be buying Irish Government bonds, who may have done so in the past, potential ... people who would potentially lend to the Irish Government. Now, I met a lot of these people - they were very interested in the Irish economy and developments and stuff like that - and quite a lot of them brought up the point that the ECB appears to be hostile to this lending that it's doing - the ELA that's growing. And I remember somebody, one of them, saying to me - and again this somebody I'm trying to convince that they should lend to the Irish Government at reasonable interest rates - they said, "What are you going to do when the ECB pulls the funding from your banks?" They were talking about the Anglo stuff, in other words, forcing the Irish Government to go to the market to raise €40 billion, which it couldn't possibly do. And I said, "That's not going to happen." And he said, "Well, excuse me, I was in Frankfurt [I think that's what he said] yesterday and I met ECB officials and they told me that's what they are considering, so how do you answer that?" Now some of this was in the papers in the sense that ... I mean, they had, in early October, began to tighten up on liquidity. They had loosened things during the global financial crisis and they had begun to tighten things up - that was public. But it was clear that potential investors, whoever they were talking to, were being told that they want ... they're not happy with this and they're considering doing something about it, which would force the Irish Government on to the market to raise €40 billion.