Professor Gregory Connor:

The blanket liability guarantee was an error. The two banks that were most obviously insolvent should have been left out and restructured and that should have been obvious. If the information provided by the Central Bank, Financial Regulator and the banks had been appropriate, it would have been obvious to the Government that the two most insolvent banks should not have been included in a liability guarantee. They were very costly errors. I note €35 billion just for those two. I disagree with Donal Donovan on that point. Obviously most of the damage had been done. The economy was going into a long slump but it could have saved a big chunk of that money. Obviously, you would have the problem that if you default, then you lose some access, they say, so there would have been some repercussions from that event. The private banks would have defaulted on their liabilities but that tends to quickly dissipate. It was not a claim by the Irish taxpayer; it was a claim by private banks and they should have defaulted on those claims.