Michael Noonan (Limerick City, Fine Gael)

The comments attributed to me in Der Spiegel are totally and completely untrue. The Greek Finance Minister came up to me after my contribution and thanked me personally for my support in the course of the meeting. I do not know who did the spinning but it was the opposite of the views I expressed that appeared in Der Spiegel.

On the other issue about the level of trade between Ireland and Greece, to which the Deputy referred, if one is communicating to an international audience, as I was at a Bloomberg conference when everything was going out live online, and one runs a bundle of statistics at the audience, they do not know what one is talking about. I made a very simple point that it is unlikely there will be contagion from Greece to Ireland because the links between Greece and Ireland are very limited both on imports and exports and in banking. I used an image as there were many people in the audience. I said that if one is in a supermarket how many items produced in Greece would one have in one's shopping basket? I think that is a reasonable way to get an image across, especially to an international audience of investors, particularly in the United States, who quite frequently put Greece, Portugal and Ireland all in the one category. As we have said on several occasions, there are very little similarities between the Greek economy and the Irish economy. If one looks at the statistics, our exports to Greece are less than 0.5% of our total exports and our imports from Greece are less than one tenth of 1% of our total imports.

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