Mr. Pádraig Dalton:

It was the first major classification that was done under the new ESA 2010 rules. It is the role of the national statistical institute to do the preliminary classification. As always EUROSTAT has the final say. Our assessment of it was based on the business case that was there because all that was available at the time was the business case. Every argument we made we were able to link back to the ESA 2010 regulation and also the Manual on Government Debt and Deficit, MGDD, statistics. Every part of the assessment, every criterion, we were able to point to the reason we assigned certain things to being on or off balance sheet.

EUROSTAT in its response, perhaps, was not able to articulate its rationale in the same way in that it was not able to link it exactly to the various elements of ESA 2010. In its response, it said that it has to take an holistic approach without defining what that holistic approach was. There were issues of interpretation around ESA 2010 because it was the first time it was being implemented and we took the view-----