CNBC, the US financial news network, has again roiled independent analysts here by claiming that Ireland is now the most indebted country on earth, with debts of $2.38 trillion (€1.6 trillion).

In a new analysis, its website CNBC.com chalks up Ireland as the No 1 most debt-laden country by excluding other "small" states such as Luxembourg and Monaco, which also have huge international banking centres in their bank yards.

CNBC claims that debts here stretch out to 1,267% of Irish GDP, amounting to $567,805 (€382,710) for every Irish citizen.

When it first did the analysis in the spring, CNBC angered government officials and analysts here by purporting that banking debt, including the liabilities of banks in the International Financial Services Centre (IFSC), placed Ireland among a group of the most debt-ridden countries.

Rossa White, chief economist at Davy Stockbrokers, said CNBC was repeating its error that Irish taxpayers were responsible for the debts of banks based in the IFSC.

"As almost everybody in the world knows, Irish taxpayers are not responsible for the liabilities held by foreign banks in the IFSC.

"It is not the same as Iceland, where their own residents were the ones who took out the external debt. Residents in Ireland are not responsible for almost all the borrowings of the IFSC banks," said White.

Analysts say that when Depfa, the Dublin-based unit of Germany's Hypo Real Estate, almost collapsed it was German taxpayers, not Irish residents, who bailed out its parent Hypo Real Estate. Depfa had its head offices in Dublin to benefit from low levels of Irish corporation tax.

Ireland is similar to Luxembourg, which also hosts a huge funds-management industry, analysts say.

In his analysis on the website, CNBC producer Paul Toscano acknowledged that the original analysis last spring upset commentators here. It included Ireland because of World Bank figures, he wrote.

"The first time this analysis was published on CNBC.com, it stirred angst from Ireland over the numbers, as the country was a significant outlier in the final data," Toscano wrote. "A further breakdown of the country's external debt data, provided by the World Bank, shows that a significant proportion of the country's external debt is represented by the country's banking sector, accounting for approximately $976.48bn."

"However, to get a true apples-to-apples comparison, data from the World Bank as well as external debt estimates by the US government were used, numbers which take into account this lending facility and any given country's banking system as components of the overall debt number," Toscano continued.