Michael Noonan (Limerick City, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Deputy Murphy's last intervention is composed of series of rhetorical questions which are not real questions. They are rhetorical questions to make political points. As I stated at the start of the process we are engaged in now, we stated our position very early on at the first meeting where this was discussed in the Eurogroup and ECOFIN. At the meeting, and publicly, I stated the Irish position was that we want Greece to stay in the euro and we are opposed to any write-downs of Greek nominal debt. We also went on to say that we appreciated the difficulty of Greece, the amount of sacrifices made and the amount of suffering incurred by many ordinary individuals in Greece. We said we were willing to participate in a negotiation which would alleviate the burden and that there are other ways to do that rather than nominal write-downs.