Ms Ann Nolan:

Technically, it is our debt. I totally get the Deputy's political point that she does not believe the country should have accepted that debt. They are Government bonds that rank pari passuwhether they are held in the Central Bank or somewhere else.

In terms of the classification of debt and the issue of whether there was a game-changer, the argument from a purely market-based point of view was that unless there was a prospect of that debt being locked in for a long time, we could not have gone back into the markets and got the interest rates down to where they are now, which is an extremely low level, much lower than we would have imagined even when we did the deal. Now that the interest rates are so low and there is a possibility of them going up, if we accept that it is debt, which we do, I, as a technician, have to accept it is debt and that the Government has taken it.