Peter Mathews (Dublin South, Fine Gael)
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Well done to the Minister on getting a grand gain of just over the €1 billion mark. I believe he is right to save that in order to look at the possibilities for capital programmes and capital expenditures. As they are non-recurring, it is easier to keep the tiller steady on the current account.

On the debt levels and debt maturities, the financial press talks about skyscraper roll-overs and that sort of thing. The fact we got an extra seven years on the maturities of the programme debt plus the rolling out over 40 years of the promissory note profile takes away some of the dangers on the skyscraper re-financing that will be occurring in two or three years' time. I ask the Minister to extend rather than pull the punches with people at the ECB and EU over the necessity to get some retrospective creditor financing for the banks so the banks can actually be further capitalised. My estimates are that they need a good deal more financing capital to absorb the losses that Ms Fiona Muldoon, for example, has flagged in SMEs on top of the mortgage losses, which need to be surgically dealt with.

I would love to hear from the Minister what is his definition of "exiting the programme". People throw out that phrase and, to my mind, exiting a programme is when all the available facilities have been used up, they are disbursed and one has then to keep in line with the conditionality of the ongoing commitments under the loan agreements. Is that what the Minister understands by it?