Professor Alan Ahearne:

Stuff could have been done while the bank ... while the property market bubble was inflating, yes, so if you're talking about ... if you're ... but once we got to where we were in, let's say, 2008, I think there wasn't a whole lot could be done on the Irish side. There was a lot of work to be done in restructuring the banks and fixing the public finances, but if you're talking about, sort of, avoiding the pain of the bursting of the bubble, then not a whole that could be done on the Irish side.

If we had the, sort of, European mechanisms - the banking union, quantitative easing - and if they had been in place in 2008, that would have made, I think, the deleveraging and the deflating of the Irish economy, and the recovery, easier, but that's not an issue for the ... I mean, that would ... that's not something that the Irish authorities had control of.