Dr. Donal Donovan:

I have no special information on the question of the process. All I have to go on is what others who are more informed and were directly involved have written about the matter. It is fairly clear from Governor Honohan's chapter in the Brian Lenihan memorial book that there was a proposal to undertake some possible burning. It is a very important chapter because he discusses this question in some detail. I ask the committee to excuse me while I try to find the right place in the book in question. I presume the mention of "negotiators on the other side" on page 81 of the book refers to the IMF. It probably does not refer to the ECB, as we know. Maybe the European Commission was somewhere in the middle. I do not know. Governor Honohan states:

Above all, negotiators on the other side dangled, but ultimately withdrew support for, the attractive idea of imposing losses on some bondholders (no longer covered by the original guarantee, which had already expired). It was on Friday 26 November that the Troika staff told Brian in categorical terms that burning the bondholders would mean no programme and, accordingly, could not be countenanced. For whatever reason, they waited until after this showdown to inform me of this decision, which had apparently been taken at a very high level teleconference to which no Irish representative was invited.

What was the teleconference? We can find a reference to it in a book written by the former US Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner. It is a little bit like a detective story.