Ms Brenda McVeigh:

We have not done an analysis for the simple reason that we feel the directive or proposal has not yet been fleshed out and there are still a lot of unknowns in it. That said, we have contacted the NTMA and asked for its view on the impact it will have on debt management. We have also sent on to the NTMA what details we have relating to the UK challenge - not a lot - and have asked it to examine that and see whether it concurs with the analysis. We have preliminary soundings back that suggest it agrees to a large extent with what the UK authorities have been saying all along on the debt management issue. However, no formal debt analysis has been done.