Professor Alan Ahearne:

If you look at what happened to the yields ... Let’s say the ECB had announced - they didn’t have the programme, but they announced that they would stand behind the Irish banks and that somehow stemmed deposit outflows from the Irish banks. The Irish Government’s plan was to get ... would have then ... wouldn’t have entered a programme. It would have issued the national recovery plan. We would have gone into 2011, but the yields on Irish Government debt were continuing to rise. They didn’t stop rising until we got to the summer of 2011. At that stage the Irish State would have been well out of cash.