The Irish National Pension Reserve Fund has posted a 4.5% return for the six months of 2004 taking the fund's total assets to €10.6bn ($12.8bn). Last week, the fund put two of its eighteen international investment managers on watch for poor performance.

The National Pension Reserve Fund, one of the biggest state pension funds, was created in 2001 to provide partial funding of Ireland's pension costs from 2025.