Professor Alan Ahearne:

No. So what he wanted ... I mean, Ireland was under pressure in sovereign ... in the markets. The national recovery plan would have been part of it, so what he wanted to do was get the national recovery plan out, publish it. He wanted the ECB to say that ... because the banks were separately under stress on their funding, he wanted the ECB to say publicly that they stood behind the Irish banks and provide liquidity. By the way, the ECB were never asked to give capital to the Irish banks. It's not that they were asked to pay for a single cent, they were being asked to give funding but they were repaid all the funding. But he wanted them to say that they would stand behind him. And then he was willing to enter some sort of precautionary programme and what he had in mind is they could ... I mean, he said they could do quarterly surveillance if they wanted but the Irish State had enough ... the sovereign had enough money to keep going to the middle of 2011. So he said "Look, let's use that money. If the markets haven't improved, we can run down that money. We've just given ourselves time, given everybody time [the Irish State] given the Europeans time." Because they were in turmoil over what was going on - this was, remember, the start of the EU area crisis - maybe get some money to keep the State going until the end of 2011 and at that stage if Ireland still did not have access to the markets, they had pulled out at this stage, then we'd go for a full-blown programme, but he wanted some time.