Professor Patrick Honohan:

Well, it was clear that Anglo and INBS were heading towards a wind-down. They had no future, this was already decided by ... by the Government. I think, probably, the troika people felt that somehow they ... it would be a safer situation going forward if there were no depositors in a bank that was heading towards a wind down. So, that seemed to be probably their thinking behind it but I don't think it was worked through. So, as far as the Irish side were concerned, we were just orderly winding those entities down, as indeed has happened subsequently. Merger of EBS to AIB ... AIB had lots of problems themselves ... and, I think it's axiomatic in this kind of ... in ... in a banking crisis, if you have two weak banks this ... the seemingly attractive solution to merge them and make one strong bank never works, it always ends up as two ... as one large weak bank. So ... but EBS was small enough for AIB to be able to bolt it on and not really suffer too many management distractions. So, we were relaxed about that. We did recognise that EBS, as a small bank - monoline bank - probably didn't have a very strong future, so-----