Noonan upbeat despite State’s net debt ballooning last year by €36.3bn

It might have been the fact that he's about to slip off on his summer holiday but the Minister for Finance Michael Noonan was particularly upbeat yesterday at the launch of the National Treasury Management Agency's annual report.

You’d never have guessed that the State’s net debt had ballooned last year by €36.3 billion to €173.9 billion.

Or that our interest bill rose to just under €8.1 billion from almost €6.5 billion in 2012.

The Minister said about €40 billion of the State’s debt related to the banks, with the annual interest a mere €1 billion.

This is “contrary” to what a lot of Opposition parties might have us think.

This might be so but €1 billion could go a long way in health or education spending if we didn’t have the burden of the banks on our backs.

It's all relative of course. In late 2010, Ireland's bond yields were north of 14 per cent, which led us to seek the warm embrace of the IMF and our EU partners under the old Fianna Fáil regime.

It’s a measures of how far the Irish economy has come in the intervening period, under the Fine Gael-Labour Coalition, that Noonan is now seeking to refinance €15 billion of the €22 billion we borrowed from the IMF. With a yield of almost 5 per cent, the IMF loans are now considerably more expensive than the 2.3 per cent rate that 10-year Irish paper currently attracts.

Noonan noted that, depending on the day and the rate achieved, up to €375 million could be shaved off our interest costs if we can secure a deal.

It would be another small step on the road to reducing the debt burden on the exchequer.

It would also give the Minister a bit more wriggle room when framing his budget next year, his final one before a general election in the spring of 2016.