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

My recall of it was that the troika were very proper in their relationships with the Government and the Government parties and with the Opposition parties. And while they briefed me and the Fine Gael Front Bench extensively around the time the programme was being drawn up, there was no contact with them during the election campaign and there was no contact with them when Labour and Fine Gael were designing the programme for Government, but we knew that there were certain things that couldn’t be ignored.

First of all, there was a programme agreed and we knew from the discussions with them before the election that they expected us to implement the programme. A part of the negotiation I did with them at that stage was I got them to agree that they would be prepared to negotiate changes in the programme if we were to substitute an alternative measure of equal fiscal value. In other words, if it raised the same tax surfeit and same expenditure effect, they were prepared to talk in those terms. But, of course, they had qualifications in that it couldn’t be once off - to get back to a previous question - it couldn’t be something that just applied for the one year, it would have to be something that had a base effect which would go forward. But there was no suggestion at all that the troika got involved in any way in the formation of the Government and they had done an arrangement with the previous Government and the previous Government ... if the previous Government got re-elected, they’d have been quite happy to work with them. If your suggestion is they were looking for a change of Government, that is not the position-----