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Central Bank governor Patrick Honohan last night asked his fellow ECB chiefs if they would allow Ireland to side-step a €3.1bn payment due to the former Anglo Irish Bank at the end of the month.
But informed sources last night insisted that there had "absolutely" not been any agrement on the issue - though there is a chance that something will be agreed today and announced in the Dail.
As talks intensified, Mr Honohan travelled to Frankfurt yesterday afternoon for the bi-monthly meeting of the ECB's powerful governing council this morning. He dined with fellow governors last night.
The ECB has made clear that it is not open to Ireland simply postponing the payment, since that would constitute the State failing to keep its financial commitments. Mr Honohan will instead suggest that the Government make the payment to the newly renamed IBRC, but the payment is immediately recycled into an Irish sovereign bond.
This means that the original IOU given by the State to Anglo will still be honoured, but the payment won't impact on the national finances since the money will go right back into state coffers.
The impact for the ECB is that the bank will no longer be able to use the money it gets to pay off loans to the Central Bank.
Side-stepping the March payment is a precursor to doing a wider deal to restructure the €30bn IOU used to bail out Anglo, as well as other elements of Ireland's bank debt. Analysis from Goodbody's yesterday claimed Ireland could save €4.5bn if the Government was allowed to replace Anglo Irish Bank's €30bn IOU with a 20-year loan from Europe's bailout fund.
The report marks one of the first attempts to lay out the potential savings if the Government succeeds in its bid to restructure Ireland's massive banking debt.
Economists Dermot O'Leary and Julie Tennent focus their efforts on the ways to restructure the €30bn 'promissory notes' used to recapitalise Anglo and Irish Nationwide (now collectively known as IBRC).
They say that the State will bear funding costs of €27bn if it carries on with the existing arrangements, which involve paying off the IOUs over the next 20 years and financing that by general government borrowing at 4.7pc.
Their analysis claims that the cost of funding would fall to €22.5bn if the Government was able to get a loan from Europe's bailout fund at a rate of 4pc to cancel out the promissory note.
The result would be to reduce the annual deficit by 0.5pc over the lifetime and "would improve the State's funding profile", but the Goodbody economists say this will not be a "panacea for debt dynamics" since our debt to GDP (output) ratio "remains the same".
Officials from the European Commission, the ECB and the International Monetary Fund have been looking at ways to restructure the banking bailout since January.
