Mr. Colm McCarthy:

To address the last question first, the National Treasury Management Agency, NTMA, has done a lot of reorganisation on the time profile of the national debt and it has a very good website that explains this.

We have a very big inherited burden of Exchequer debt. It is true that the annual debt service cost that goes into the current accounts is several billion lower than we all thought it would be a few years ago. The Deputy referred to €500 million for this year. If one looks back at what people expected five years ago would be the debt service cost in the current year, the difference is €3 billion or €4 billion.