Mr. Aidan Carrigan:

I reiterate that the Minister is not involved in the day-to-day operation of the administration. In the context of the estimates on which he must report, he is obliged to rely on the information provided to him by the administrators. As I indicated in my opening statement, the Minister is considerably frustrated at the increases in the call on the fund. Such increases have occurred despite the amount of actuarial expertise which has been applied to assessing the position during the past two years.

There was no mention of 2015. However, we assessed that it would take 15 years to raise the money.

Obviously when we are looking into the future and we are trying to calculate what we think it will cost over 15 years - there are a number of moving parts - but our assessment is based on the best estimate figure of €1.1 billion to €1.3 billion. I am being a bit optimistic and hoping we can get to the €1.1 billion, which takes account of asset sales and the fact that some of these contingencies that are provided for are worst case scenarios that will not come true.

It was quite late in the day when the hedging issue was brought to the Minister’s attention. It might have been helpful if it had been raised earlier but when it was brought to our attention it was indicated to us by the administrators that they could do hedging but only if the Minister gave a further guarantee on any risk around that. There was sufficient exposure to the State in this particular instance without the Minister giving further guarantees. I understand that other approaches are being made to resolve the hedging issue and we are facilitating consideration of that by providing the expertise of the National Treasury Management Agency to work with the administrators to see if they can work a solution.