Mr. Edmund Honohan:

Yes, oblige. The initial wording in the 2014 directive was the State shall "encourage creditors." They went to the trouble of amending that in the 2021 directive and said, change that wording and say the State shall "oblige." That is hard law. There is no other way of getting around that. Why would they change those words if it had no effect whatsoever? It has an effect. It has the effect of telling member states that they should not be using soft-law regulators, as they are subject to regulatory arbitrage and all sorts and are too administrative.