Tommy Broughan (Dublin Bay North, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the delegation from the National Treasury Management Agency, NTMA.

I want to focus on the period from 2019 to 2020. Mr. O'Kelly stated that NTMA is seeking to issue between €9 billion and €13 billion in bonds over the course of the year. He said that it got 2017 off to a positive start, raising €4 billion from the syndicated issue, the 20-year bond. I notice NTMA's achievements in the past few years. It successfully raised close to €27 billion in long-term debt at a weighted average yield of just over 1.3% since the start of 2015. It repaid the IMF loan facility of €18 billion. We saw the first ever issue of the 100-year note, which saw us borrow €100 million at a yield of 2.35%. The NTMA has those achievements but, overall, Mr. O'Kelly has rightly given a very sobering account of our national debt for this committee of all committees. The global size of that and the percentage of debt compared with our general Government revenue is almost frightening, in a sense. It puts the committee and the proposals that we would make for budgets and so on under intense pressure.

The period of 2019 to 2020 seems to be a very dangerous time for NTMA and this State in the sense that a quarter of the debt, €50 billion, has to be refinanced between 2018 and 2020. Other colleagues have mentioned the grave uncertainty that we are in. We seem to be in a fundamental watershed period of history and therefore we are vulnerable. Would it therefore be appropriate to refinance as much as possible of the burden that is hanging over us in 2019 and 2020, and get on with it while the waters are relatively calm? Concerns have been raised that with Brexit and other issues, we could have a perfect storm again, like in 2009, and the agony that we have suffered since then. Is there not a huge case for doing something as soon as possible to refinance that huge burden?