Dr. Donal Donovan:

Every country is different. What happened in Ireland and what happened in the euro area was unprecedented in the history of the IMF and of the world. We had a currency union. We had lending for the first time ever to a member of a currency union. We had extraordinary circumstances as to what was the debt and the size of the debt. We had systemic failure, worldwide panic, Lehman Brothers and contagion. All of these things were unprecedented in the history of the IMF. It was therefore not a question of taking a standard cookie-cutter approach and applying it to Ireland. It could not be and it should not be.