Mr. Colm McCarthy:

We now have a very big pile of debt. It is not very short term. There will be some rollovers in the next few years and they are not trivial, but it could have been far worse. The NTMA has managed to push some of it out further through borrowing money over ten or 15 year terms at very low rates. Short-term interest rates in Europe may go the wrong way because of a screw-up in Italy. The upcoming election in Greece could threaten stability there. The real danger is not that our annual running interest bill will suddenly shoot up. It cannot do so because most of it is fixed. The real risk is that the market could go bananas, as it did in 2010, 2011 and, in particular, in 2012, when various countries could not borrow at all as the borrowing market froze. That is a bigger risk to us. The fixed coupons cannot be increased, but there is roll-over risk because we have significant rollovers in the coming years. Ireland was a Mediterranean country a few years ago. One did not notice the temperature changing. It has now been reclassified, perhaps somewhat undeservedly, as a northern European country, but our classification could very easily begin slipping southwards again if people start looking at the numbers. On the numbers, our ratio of debt to tax revenue is not as bad as that in Greece or Italy, but it is close. We have been labelled as the best boy in the class to a greater extent than we deserve. People will start focusing on those numbers again if things get messy.