Arthur Spring (Kerry North-West Limerick, Labour)
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To ask the Minister for Finance the action he has taken at a European level to address the recent revelation that Spanish banks have been securing funds at a lower risk premium than their Irish counterparts. [50741/12]

Michael Noonan (Limerick City, Fine Gael)
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As this is a Eurosystem issue relating to the application of the collateral framework rules, it is not under the direction of the Minister. However, please see below the comments from President of the ECB, Mario Draghi, when asked about the matter at the ECB press conference following the Governing Council meeting on 8 November; “Let me first make a clarification, because there has been a lot of press on this point in the last week. The first clarification is purely factual: the nominal amount of collateral being posted was not EUR 80 billion, but EUR 10 billion. The second clarification is that all this had no impact at all on our lending. So nobody received more than they should have received because of this mistake – because it was a mistake. The impact of this is zero, but we take this mistake very seriously. And so the Governing Council has mandated the Eurosystem Audit Committee, which is chaired by Governor Liikanen, to assess the implementation of the collateral framework in the Eurosystem and we will have an initial assessment of this at our next Governing Council meeting and then we will discuss whether further analysis or further action is needed and I will keep you posted on that.”