The Margin feels sure that they were rather pleased in the Department of Finance and the Central Bank with a letter in this week's Financial Times. Headed "Ireland and Portugal may influence European interest rate noticeably", it was penned by Gabriel Mangano from Lausanne University in Switzerland. He was taking issue with a piece in the FT which speculated that Ireland and Portugal would have little influence on the interest rate policy of the European Central Bank. Not true, says Mr Mangano, who points out that the council which will decide interest rates is made up of six executive directors and it also has one non-executive representative from each of the member-states.

Thus the one Irish vote on the council will be worth as much as that of the likes of Belgium, Austria and Luxembourg, other countries which have one non-executive director but no representative among the six executive directors. He goes on to calculate using a complicated model that Ireland could end up being "decisive" in up to 13 per cent of all interest rate decisions, providing it manages to persuade some other council members that they should vote with it. This compares with a maximum of 15 per cent for countries with one executive and one non-executive director.

Ireland and Portugal, Mr Mangano concludes, "should thus be relieved to know that, as far as the European Central Bank's interest rate decisions are concerned, just like in other circumstances, size does not seem to matter that much, after all". Indeed.