When Ireland lost access to the markets, the availability of borrowed funds depended on the foreign official lenders. They have authorized sufficient funds for what has to be described as a rather gradual glide-path  3  4  Almost all of the unguaranteed senior bonds of IBRC have now been repaid.
When we do that, we find that rates have been much more similar across the two loan types in the past; although, a wedge has opened up more recently as we’d expect (Graph 3). This highlights the value of examining loan-level data.