Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 24 June 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. Kevin Cardiff:

Yes, because Mr. Trichet was trying to hold together the entire EMU project. So we are there, we have a particular national problem and we're fighting hard and he's trying to think well, what's the implication of this for the entire eurozone. So he has a different perspective. What was really important to us might seem to him, you know, that to achieve a saving of several billion is quite a good deal, if we got a 15% reduction on that 19 that would be nearly €10 billion. That was really important to us but for him ... if you're sitting in Frankfurt and you're saying €10 billion and we could have risked the whole project, you might think it is not worth doing.