When it was set up back in 1990, Ireland was the beggar man of Europe with 1 in 4 of all taxes being gobbled up just to pay interest on the debt. Now it would take little more than half of the taxes collected in a single year to rid ourselves entirely of the 38bn burden so that the nation could live in debt-free bliss.

Has the time finally arrived to bid fond farewell to Auntie Mae, the pet name for the NTMA in financial circles, asking chief executive Michael Somers to shut up shop and accept the thanks of a grateful nation for a job well done?

Not quite. Even as the debt has shrunk, Somers's workload has grown as the NTMA has taken on a whole range of new tasks. It manages the 17bn National Pensions Reserve Fund. It looks after more than 200m snatched by the state from dormant bank accounts. It deals with the state's huge bill for personal injury claims, currently running at 250m. It even manages the money the state has set aside to purchase carbon credits, the mechanism that allows us buy our way out of our failure to even come close to meeting emissions targets set in Kyoto.

With so many balls in the air, is Auntie Mae in danger of losing the single mindedness that allowed her tackle the national debt so effectively?

Somers says the NTMA gladly accepts whatever tasks are assigned to it by government, adding that its growing workload reflects its ability to get the job done. "There's an argument that we've gone out and tried to grab business but everything we do has been decided by the Oireachtas, " he says. "We're the only agency the government has where the people are not civil servants. We're run as a business. We're psychologically geared to doing things rather than agonising over how things should be done."

Having spent his career as a civil servant, until Charlie Haughey plucked him from the Department of Finance in 1990 to head up the NTMA, Somers is only too familiar with its plodding ways. "The last time I spoke about the civil service I got myself into trouble so I don't want to stir it up again, " he says.

"It's not necessarily geared to taking decisions, largely because civil servants have no incentive to put their necks on the line."

Somers is especially proud of what he sees as the go-getting culture that Auntie Mae has fostered in her 120 staff, all of whose pay is linked to performance. Even former civil servants have caught the bug and, of the 25 who came across with Somers in 1990, about a dozen are still at the NTMA, while the rest have progressed to other careers in the private sector.

"There was a concern at the time in the Department of Finance that we would poach the best and I suppose that concern was to some extent justified, " he says. "We've a wide range of expertise and professions working here including bond traders, lawyers, economists and accountants. We've even got two doctors and three nurses working for the State Claims Agency."

Despite all of the other distractions, the national debt remains Auntie Mae's top priority and Somers believes that most of what can be done to cut the interest bill has been done. Such is the turnaround in the public finances that Ireland can borrow as cheaply in the eurozone as benchmark economies such as Germany and France. "We've probably squeezed the last drop of blood out of it by this stage, " Somers says.

But scope remains for more blood letting in other areas, especially the 6.2bn that has accumulated in the government's various savings schemes over the years, which amount to 16% of the entire national debt. Auntie Mae minds the money, tucked away in savings certs, savings bonds, prize bonds and post office accounts. But she is fed up with the high cost that others charge to operate the hundreds of thousands of individual savings accounts involved.

Last year the bill came to 44.5m, with the bulk going to An Post.

That's way too much, according to Somers, even though the fee paid to An Post has been frozen for the last two years. "We've ongoing difficulties with An Post over the administration charges they want us to pay, " he says.

"We've said we're not going to pay them anymore. They're too high and a source of considerable annoyance."

Relations could sour even more as An Post prepares to link up with Fortis, a Belgian-Dutch bank, to provide an expanded range of financial services through the post office network. Where will this leave An Post's long-standing relationship with the NTMA? Somers says he is still waiting to find out.

The next big task for Auntie Mae could be to manage the hundreds of millions of euro that would be collected if the government decided to force us to save for retirement.

Mandatory pensions are still only at the ideas stage and will never become reality if employers and the Department of Finance get their way.

Nevertheless it has already been suggested that, if we are to be forced to contribute to a pension, Auntie Mae could provide a comfort blanket by making sure the money was wisely invested. Somers is clearly uncomfortable with the idea that the NTMA could somehow provide fail-safe pensions, especially as he still bears the scars from the savage criticism heaped on the National Pensions Reserve Fund when its establishment was quickly followed by the worst stock market crash in living memory.

"We're not miracle workers and, if stock markets go down, there's nothing we can do about it, " he says.

"We had a terrible first year in the pension reserve fund when the markets nose dived."

Nevertheless, Somers says the NTMA would probably do a better job at protecting consumers' interests than if they were left to pick and choose their own pension provider.

"A lot of people are not terribly sophisticated on the financial front and they'd be put off if they had to deal directly with financial institutions for their pensions, " he says.

"A lot of people are alarmed by the entry costs, the exit costs and management fees imposed by the financial institutions. If it was decided that we should have a role, we'd come up with a much simpler model."

Somers is no stranger to pension problems, having devised a scheme to cover the widows and children of deceased public servants while still a junior Merrion Street mandarin working for Charlie Haughey in the late 1960s. It gave him first-hand experience of Haughey's famous refusal to bend to bureaucratic obfuscation.

"The Department of Finance wanted to give nothing away and I was flattered when Haughey asked me what my view was, especially as it wasn't the department's view, " he says.

Over the years their paths crossed many times, culminating in Somers's appointment to the NTMA. "I've a very high regard for Mr Haughey in terms of his ability to see a problem and deal with it, " he says. "Of course we had our disputes from time to time and I've been on the receiving end of his temper from time to time."

CV MICHAEL SOMERS

Job: chief executive, National Treasury Management Agency
Family: Married to Deirdre, four children
Education: St Mary's, Rathmines; UCD Career: Fo ras Tionscail 1960-1963;

Department of Finance 1963-1968; Central Bank 1968-1970; Assistant secretary, Depatyment of Finance 19701985; Secretary, Department of Defence 1985-1987; Secretary, National Debt Management 1987-1990; Chief executive, NTMA 1990 to date Directorships: European Investment Bank, Irish Stock Exchange, Dublin Chamber of Commerce, St Vincent's Hospital, Dublin

THE NATIONAL TREASURY MANAGEMENT AGENCY National debt: 38.2bn Interest payments: 1.8bn National Pension Reserve Fund: 15.4bn Government retail savings: 6.2bn Dorman Accounts Fund: 204.4m State Claims Agency, outstanding reserve value: 250m