Professor Alan Ahearne:

The net cost would be a lot less than €40 billion I think. The problem is that the cost is changing all the time. As long-term interest rates have fallen dramatically over the last 12 months, the cost of the burden of recapitalising the banks has been reduced. The €64 billion is a particular number, it is the headline number, but the actual cost, the burden in terms of the Irish people paying out, has fallen quite dramatically over the last 12 months because long-term interest rates have fallen because of the ECB's OMT programme that it announced, and more recently the quantitative easing. The cost is determined by when the State issues the debt into the market that it is using to recapitalise. The debt that was used to recapitalise Anglo was not issued into the market. It was given to Anglo and given to the Irish Central Bank. That has not gone into the market. It is still within the system. It is only now that the Irish Central Bank is issuing that debt to the market. That is the key time period. At the moment ten-year money is less than 1%.