Ireland’s national debt could approach €250 billion by the 2030s, the head of the National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA) will tell an Oireachtas committee on Thursday.
NTMA chief executive Frank O’Connor is expected to warn the Dáil Public Accounts Committee (PAC) that such a level of debt carries risk and that the era of the State borrowing money at low interest rates was over.
He will say the State needs to be prepared to pay higher costs in the future.
O’Connor is expected to say that, when the NTMA was established 35 years ago, Ireland had a national debt of about €30 billion.
“That was seen as high then. But today it is over €200 billion – and by the 2030s will potentially be approaching a quarter of a trillion euro. While the population and the size of the economy have grown since then, it is still a very high level of indebtedness.
