If the sales hype is to be believed, the women will spend the cash on breast enlargements, the men will buy jet skis and the elderly will go on foreign holidays.

As the first 40,000 of Ireland's special savings investment accounts matured this week, releasing close to €600m into an already overheating economy, the country's retailers were ready. In the next 12 months, a total of €16bn worth of accounts are set to mature and more than 1m people will receive an average of €15,000.

"We're in a unique position for an industrialised economy where 40 per cent of adults are making regular savings," said David Went, chief executive of Irish Life & Permanent.

A survey by IIB and the Economic and Social Research Institute found that 27 per cent of savers intended to make a big purchase, increasing overall consumer spending by 8 per cent.

"If someone wanted a breast augmentation they're hardly going to ask their bank manager for the loan. Now they don't have to, they've got the cash," says Andrew Rittweger, general manager of Dublin's Auralia clinic which specialises in cosmetic surgery procedures.

Travel companies, too, are hoping to benefit. Twohigs on Dublin's Dawson Street recently covered its three-storey building with a banner encouraging people to "fly away with your SSIA".

When Charlie McCreevy, the former Irish finance minister introduced the product in 2001, it was in response to European Commission concerns the Irish economy was overheating.

It was an expensive exercise. For every €4 invested the government provided an extra €1. It also proved a fairly regressive form of redistribution as most of the account holders tended to be older and wealthier than the government envisaged. But the five-year maturity term suggests the real rationale was political, giving the economy a lift ahead of the general election, which has to be called next May.

Today the authorities' main concern is to contain consumer spending. The financial regulator is encouraging savers to pay off credit card debts.

The banks are hoping to retain a slice of the money, by diverting it into new savings products. "Of our SSIA holders, 75 per cent said they had never saved regularly before," says Brian Goggin, chief executive of Bank of Ireland.

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