Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 15 July 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. John Corrigan:

Well, again, as I said, we did various simulations internally. It's what you do. That's ... we were responsible for the management of the debt and a question is, is the debt sustainable? And we did a number of simulations based on different growth rates and, as I said earlier, if you took ... if you took the Department of Finance's growth rate, which, to be fair to the Department, their projections over the period of the programme more or less turned out to be the case. But at the most pessimistic end of the scale, was the ECB, which would have envisaged, to the best of my recollection now, a growth rate ... a GDP nominal growth rate of, I think, 2% less ... lower than the Department's. You were looking, in certain circumstances, at a debt-to-GDP ratio of 160%. Now, you've got to go back ... you're looking at this in late 2010, early 2011 and it behoved us ... if that was in the range of possibilities as we saw in our simulations, it behoved us to bring back the question of burden-sharing back onto the table.