Ireland's economic adjustment program make progress

The European Commission said on Friday that Ireland's economic adjustment program aimed at cutting the country's deficit and boosting economic growth made important progress, which paves way for the disbursement of the remaining bailout loans to Dublin. The European Commission made the assessment after a joint mission of the Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund completed the third review from July 6-15. The third installment of 5.5 billion euros (7.7 billion U.S. dollars) is planned to be disbursed to Ireland in two tranches by end-September and end-October, the Commission said in a statement. The EU and the IMF agreed in November last year to provide a total of 67.5 billion euros (97.5 billion U.S. dollars) in credit line to debt-laden Ireland and Ireland in turn agreed to overhaul its banking sector, cut its deficit and introduce structural reforms to boost economic growth. The Commission said that Ireland is gradually returning to positive growth this year driven by strong exports. "Fiscal performance so far this year has been satisfactory and the budget deficit for 2011 as a whole is now projected to be well below the 10.5 percent of GDP program ceiling," the statement said. The Commission said that recapitalization of Irish banks has been completed and the budgetary costs are "significantly" lower than originally anticipated due to participation of private investors. The Irish government will publish a medium term fiscal consolidation plan for 2012 and 2015, which aims to cut its deficit to below 3 percent of GDP in 2015.