The Government is loaded, but don’t ask what they’re doing with it

WHAT would you do if someone gave you €13.6 billion? I know the standard answer — you’d probably add a few bob to it and pay your debts.

But when you stop to think about it, it's a lot of money an awful lot of money. Even if you had a lot of parties, and invited all the neighbours to each one, you wouldn't make a hole in the first million. Even if you gave them all a car to drive home in. €13.6bn. This is what it looks like when it's set out in figures €13,600,000,000.

Do you get the picture? It's almost too much money for any of us to get our heads around. It's actually the equivalent of around €3,500 for every man, woman and child in Ireland. There's no doubt about it, if you were the Government and you had that amount of money available to you, you could solve an awful lot of problems.