Public Debt, External Debt expressed as percent of GDP is a confusing mess that does not tell you the health of country. The issue with debt is what was it invested in...Debt has to be assessed in terms of assets....Public Debt to aggregate assets would be an interesting metric. Expressing as GDP as a wealth ratio is misleading crap. The only part of the GDP that has anything to do with wealth is the 'investment' calculation (GDP is the sum of 'consumption', 'investment' and 'government spending'...plus net of imports/exports). The only way to honestly look at national wealth is to looks at aggregate assets...the only part of GDP that relates to aggregate assets is the 'investment' metric. A better metric for growth or wealth is the ratio of the 'investment' metric to total GDP. After all the other parts of GDP are spending metrics that do not produce any wealth. Think about it this way .... if I owe $1M and I used the money to buy a hotel that can now be liquidated for only $900k, then that is a debt to asset problem....on the other hand if I borrowed $500K and spent the money living in a hotel, that would be quite a more serious debt to asset problem, even though the total debt owed was lower; the difference is in the value of the assets acquired by the application of the debt and potential to retire the debt from the continuing use valuation of the asset. You have to asses debt by looking at what you spent it on. Debt is only a problem if the cost of maintaining the interest and amortizing the debt is greater than the return (growth) of the asset you invested the debt in. If you think about it a little you can see that Ireland has a much better chance of paying off its debts than Greece does.