Ireland must honour payments: Draghi

Ireland must continue to make payments on €27bn-worth of high-interest IOUs on schedule, ECB president Mario Draghi said yesterday.

However, he refused to be drawn on the likelihood of a deal to ease the country’s funding burden.

The Government has been campaigning for months to soften the terms of the bank bailout by replacing the promissory notes given mainly to the former Anglo Irish Bank with another instrument that would lengthen their maturity and cut their interest rate.