Clare Daly (Dublin North, United Left)
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170. To ask the Minister for Finance his views on the annual report of the Comptroller and Auditor General in 2014, which showed that Ireland is required to borrow €1 billion each year just to pay the interest on that part of the sovereign debt which was created solely to bail out the banks; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [44106/15]

Michael Noonan (Limerick City, Fine Gael)
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In Chapter 3 of his Annual Report for 2014, The C&AG included his estimate of the opportunity cost to date of servicing the debt to fund the bank investments. In addition, he also included his estimate of the future cost in this regard, under certain scenarios e.g. the amount the State receives from any future disposals of its remaining banking investments, and market interest rates in the future.

In our reporting, we do not include such estimates and we only include the verifiable cash amount invested in the banks, and the amounts returned from disposals, income received on these investments, and fees.

If my Department was to diverge from such an approach we would be straying into the area of counterfactual analysis, in which case there are wider considerations that would also need to be taken into account. The most obvious would be the direct and indirect costs to the State and its citizens if the taxpayer had not invested in the banks due to their systemic importance.