Mr. Ajai Chopra:

Now, as I said in my written statement, the right time for a country to enter into a programme is when it's vulnerable but not in a full-blown crisis. Now, within that, there's a continuum. At one end of the continuum, you have a situation where a country can ask for help at the very first sign of some trouble, or it could wait, and the other end of the continuum would be that it cannot pay next week's wages, pensions and debt service. So within that, there's a number of other possibilities. Now, it's most unusual for a country to come right at the beginning, at the first sign of trouble, because there is an enormous amount of stigma. That's something that the IMF has not been able to address in its programmes. It's well known that there's stigma about entering into an IMF programme. And also there's always the hope that you can ride out the troubles. But it's equally disadvantageous to come at the very end, and Ireland did not do that. It did still have a bit of a cash buffer. It had lost access, but it still had a cash buffer. So a judgment has to be made, and, on balance, the IMF favoured coming earlier rather than later. Now, the precise consequences of when it came in, versus having come in even earlier, you know, one cannot be definitive about that. One can only speculate, and in my written answers I talked about, you know, the possible ... that one can easily paint a plausible scenario where if it had come in earlier, there might've been a more robust and credible bank recapitalisation and, you know, the economy might not have contracted as much and, you know, property prices may not have overshot. So, all these are plausible. I can paint that scenario; you can paint that scenario. But can I, sort of, say with a very high degree of confidence that that's exactly how it would've played out? No, I can't say that.