Michael Noonan (Limerick City, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Yes, I did. Yes, I’m an optimist, you know. I thought it was a pretty good programme and, as I said, Brian Lenihan was held in high regard in Europe and I thought that it was a programme sufficient for the disaster that the country was facing. I’m not saying, like, that in your career as a politician you’d be wishing for a programme like this or that it’d be the kind of thing that you’d want to happen and that you’d have it to implement. It wasn’t good news, but in terms of ... if you measured the programme against the crisis that it was supposed to resolve, I thought it had the main elements in place and if we could adjust it through renegotiation, we could improve on it, and that’s what we did.