CENTRAL Bank governor Patrick Honohan has downplayed Professor Morgan Kelly’s high profile dire warning of a financially dead Ireland, from earlier in the week, by defending the Government’s austere budgetary measures and denying Ireland will need IMF help.

ANGLO Irish Bank’s external auditors, Ernst & Young, have refused to attend a hearing of an Oireachtas committee which is examining the bank’s meltdown.

Financial regulator Patrick Neary is to make his first public appearance since resigning over a secret loans scandal at troubled Anglo Irish Bank when he is grilled by an Oireachtas Committee in Leinster House tomorrow.