Mr. Conor O'Kelly:

I refer the Deputy to page 6 of the slides presentation I circulated which includes a table setting out the outstanding debt in official and benchmarked bonds. The Deputy can see from that the amount outstanding, the average life and the rate we are paying on each. We cannot borrow at cheaper rates than those of the EFSF or the EFSM. We paid €18 billion of the IMF loans and €4 billion remains. The rate on that is approximately 0.5% for an average life of six years. Depending on where the market is at any one time, there are marginal savings we could opportunistically look at if yields went a little bit lower but it is quite marginal. To repay the IMF loans requires the approval from all members of the troika, which they gave for the €18 billion on the condition, where we did not have to pay their loan back pro rata, that post-programme monitoring would be in place. The minimum amount of loans that could remain with the IMF was €4 billion, which means that the IMF is obliged to continue to monitor Ireland in the post-programme period. That was a condition of that. So there are two things. It is not straightforward to repay that. It would require the permission of all of the member states and the savings would be marginal.

Respecting that, as the Chairman says, marginal in the context of a €200 billion debt is not the same as marginal in the world the Oireachtas operates in day-to-day, the savings in the market now could be €20 million a year over the lifetime of the loans if we were to get permission. By the time one did it, markets might have moved, one might not be able to refinance and those savings might not be as clear. It is quite marginal and all of the other official sector debt is at a maturity and financing rate that the State could not improve on and that is unlikely to change because there are stronger parties than us who are refinancing in the market place.

It is the stock available, which goes back to the point about why our average is not and will not come down as fast. It is the stock of debt in Government bonds, which is the €125 billion. We cannot necessarily mature it faster than we borrowed it. They are fixed rate bonds and they are not callable. It is possible to conduct a reverse auction. That has been done. We could announce that we would like to buy back those securities but the issue there is that we would need quite a lot more cash to do it. Those bonds are all trading at a significant premium because as yields go down, prices go up and as prices go down, yields go up. For every €100 million we bought back, we would probably have to pay €130 million. We would have to pay out €30 million in cash, which would affect the economics of the transaction.