Mr. Conor O'Kelly:

I thank the committee for its invitation to appear. I will summarise the opening statement, as the Chairman has suggested.

Starting with the funding and debt management area, which was the original business of the NTMA, it has been a pretty significant period post the pandemic and the unprecedented pro-cyclical response, which was the first pro-cyclical fiscal response in the history of the State, when the Government took the action it did post the pandemic. That action has had the impact of keeping a floor under the economy and that policy has been enormously impactful. All of that pandemic spending has been funded through borrowing and since the pandemic began we have borrowed just under €36 billion at an average interest rate of 0.16%, or just under two tenths of 1%.

The fiscal responses that were replicated right across Europe were complemented by the activities of the European Central Bank, ECB, and that is a critical point for everybody to understand in terms of the context and environment in which we are operating. It is not a single credit response from Ireland; this is Europe-wide. In that context, the European Central Bank's actions have been extraordinary. One of the things members will have read recently in the newspapers is that after the financial crisis, it took the ECB seven years to introduce quantitative easing but that, with the onset of the pandemic, it took only seven days for it to intervene with its bond-buying programmes. That is not far from being exactly what happened. The extent of the bond-buying engaged in by the ECB has been extraordinary. European sovereigns are estimated to have issued €1 trillion in total in 2020 and will issue approximately the same amount in 2021. The ECB's bond-buying programmes have been expanded to almost the equivalent of that issuance. The net issuance to investors is almost zero. In essence, the ECB is buying sovereign bonds almost one for one and that is what has allowed Ireland and other sovereigns to borrow so much so cheaply and effectively. The ECB, with its language and actions, is ensuring that that environment is likely to stay like that for quite a few years to come.

The other advantage we have is that we have termed out Ireland's debt significantly during this low-rate period. We have one of the longest maturities in Europe, at just under 11 years, and we have one of the smoothest profiles in terms of our debt. What I mean by that is that there is no one year where there is a significant disproportionate funding chimney or cliff . The environment has allowed us to do that as well. We also have significant amounts of cash in hand. As a result, the debt profile and locking in those low interest rates for a very long period gives us significant-----