Mr. Donal McNally:

-----what's said. I mean, we had this problem before in the '80s when we had debt, GDP, or GNP ratios of over 100%, that you got up to 130%, or close to it at one stage. And the interest rate regime, I think, payments were taking up a lot of the income tax receipts were going on paying the national debt.

Unless there's some debt forgiveness, then the only way we can fund that is by growing and reducing the burden in that way, so that we have more capacity to pay the interest. We did it before. It took some time to do but that's the main way. Now, obviously, before there were high interest rates we weren't part of the euro. So, you know, to the extent that the monetary policy in the euro works, and fiscal policy ... the debt burden in terms of interest rates will be a bit more manageable than it was before.