Ireland’s government debt could be approaching €250 billion by the 2030s, a level the State’s debt chief is expected to warn would carry real risk as the era of cheap borrowing fades. Frank O’Connor, the chief executive of the National Treasury Management Agency, is due on Thursday to tell the Dáil Public Accounts Committee that the State can no longer rely on the conditions that made debt easier to carry in recent years.

O’Connor is expected to say the State borrowed in a different world when the NTMA was established 35 years ago, with national debt at about €30 billion. Today, it is over €200 billion. Ireland’s population and economy have grown since then, but so too has the scale of the bill that sits on the State’s balance sheet.

That change matters now because the cost of carrying the debt remains material even after a long stretch of unusually cheap money. The State paid €3.2 billion to service the national debt in 2024, about 60 per cent lower than the peak of €8 billion in 2013. Those lower costs came after years of record low interest rates, when the NTMA locked in long-term borrowing at fixed rates and built one of the longest average maturities in Europe.

O’Connor is expected to tell lawmakers that the strategy bought time, but not immunity. The agency prefunded by borrowing early at low rates rather than waiting to borrow later at higher ones, and the benefit of that approach will recede as cheaper debts mature and are replaced with more expensive debt. In his remarks, he is expected to say the State has no room for complacency and that its ability to service debt is critical.

The warning lands at a moment when borrowing conditions have already shifted. The low-rate era that followed quantitative easing made debt servicing easier and cheaper, but that period is now over, according to the NTMA. As older debt rolls off and new financing comes in at higher rates, the State will face a more demanding interest bill even if the overall economy continues to expand.

The agency’s latest update also points to a separate issue that has lingered in the background. The NTMA says it has now recovered more of the €5 million stolen from the agency last year, bringing total net recovery to €2.5 million. Before Thursday’s committee appearance, the figure stood at €1.52 million. An independent forensic investigation by Deloitte has now been completed.

For O’Connor, the message is likely to be blunt: Ireland’s debt burden is no longer only a legacy issue from the past, but a live risk shaped by higher rates and the expiry of the cheap borrowing that kept the numbers manageable for years. The question for the State is not whether it can fund itself today. It is how much more expensive that funding becomes as the cycle turns.