Professor Philip Lane:

If the Irish Government was standing behind them - tracing this out and noting the counter-factors - and if the ECB said that it did not think our sovereign could withstand it and it did not want to make ELA available to these banks because the essential guarantor of solvency, which is the Irish sovereign, would be compromised by that - there is the matter of whether that was for the ECB to decide - we should remember that in 2008 the Irish Government still had relatively little debt. If we think about the evolution of sovereigns spread in 2009 and so on, it is only in 2010 that the sovereign bank loop got much more intense. Going back to 2008 and 2009, it was probably not the ECB's call. The ECB has a veto but the-----