Michael Noonan (Limerick City, Fine Gael)

The key element of the communiqué is the sustainability of the Irish programme. That is obviously a clear reference to getting the debt down to a stage where we go back into the markets, and then we are entirely sustainable if we can fund in the markets at low interest rates. If Deputy McGrath puts his accountancy experience to use and thinks of it in terms of a balance sheet, then he will know that it is not really possible to work on one side of the balance sheet. If debt is moved off one side of the balance sheet, what is moved off the other side? We can see how complex it is to get matching collateral that we can shift as well. When the Government put money into the banks, they took the shareholding of the banks as well.

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