Mr. Frank O'Connor:

We were fortuitous. No one can predict the future and we are fortuitous to have this gap year land right at this moment. To give some background colour, thinking back to 2014 we were looking ahead to these chimney stacks. We had the IMF repayments that were going to mature in 2017, 2018 and 2019. We could have funded to the same date at a little bit cheaper but we funded longer. Given the elevated debt level, we took the decision to extend when interest rates came down. In 2016, we could have borrowed five-year money, as sometimes the market looks at a five-year benchmark, but we thought that after the Brexit referendum there might be more uncertainty for Ireland at the turn of the decade and that it would be unnecessary to have five-year maturity when investors wanted ten, 20 or 30-year bonds, as the Deputy has seen us issue. These were some of the influences. The last piece was that it was a bit of a back-up strategy. Five or six years ago, 2020 had approximately €27 billion of maturities and we were top slicing that. The concern was that if we faced into a challenging year we could have used 2021 to borrow short some of the money and term it out. There were a few factors coming together but I do not want to overly claim, and we are quite fortuitous that it occurs now on foot of the pandemic.