Professor Alan Ahearne:

I think Brian Lenihan's style was that he liked to consider all options. I mean, he wasn't willing just to ... if an official said, you can't do A, he'd want to know why can't you do it "Well, there's problems - X,Y and Z problems", "Well, is there a way around the X, Y and Z?". So, he was very open-minded and he wanted to satisfy himself that whatever route he was doing that that was the right route and that everything else had been considered. So, was it serious? It was never ... he didn't, sort of, again, order a big ... a plan to go ahead. It wasn't that but he wanted to kick the tyres of that particular out-of-the-box alternative route, as he did with many other things. And so I thought it was just a good way of doing policy making. He thought everything through, even things that were, sort of, real left field.