Professor Alan Ahearne:

Well, that's just the point. This is ... if you have a backstop, a lender of last resort who is doing what they're doing now under ... it's now under quantitative easing where they're buying and they've driven Irish bond yields to 1.5%. But even under the OMT, which ... actually, there was no bonds bought under OMT - it was just an announcement - but that did reduce the yields. And if your yields are low enough, then when you have access you, obviously, have people who are willing to lend, then you can borrow from them and you can do the plans. I mean, ... if ... and, again, we are talking counterfactuals, which are extremely difficult. In that counterfactual, it wouldn't have made an iota of difference, I think, to the fiscal adjustments that were made. Ireland would still have had to do its fiscal adjustments. The fiscal adjustments that were done weren't done because we entered a programme; they were done because we had a very large budget deficit. Under a scenario where we could borrow from the markets, the borrowing would have been financed by the financial markets as the Government did the fiscal consolidation it did. It turns out that that money came from the official sector, but it's still the budget that had to be narrowed. It didn't make any difference to that. It may well not made a whole lot of difference on the ... what was done in the banking front. So, there was work needed to be done. The issue was who was going to finance it. Ideally, it would be financed by the markets. If the markets aren't going to finance it, then it had to be financed officially.