Irish debt sale boosts scarce pool of ECB-eligible bonds

* ECB has had to cut monthly purchases of Irish bonds

* Ireland (Other OTC: IRLD - news) covers over half of its minimum funding needs

* Yield on nine-year bond sale doubles in four months

By Padraic Halpin

DUBLIN, Feb 9 (Reuters) - Ireland raised 1.25 billion euros on Thursday in its first dual auction of bonds since 2010, refreshing a pool of Irish debt eligible for the European Central Bank's bond-buying programme that had run almost dry.

The ECB has had to cut its monthly purchases of Irish bonds to just over 500 million euros - well short of the level its rules dictate - after nearing a self-imposed limit of holding 33 percent of any country's debt.

Ireland can help alleviate the pressure by issuing new bonds, and in just six weeks has covered over half of its minimum funding needs for the year. It sold 4 billion euros of 20-year bonds, its first issue at that maturity, via a syndicate of banks last month.

On Thursday, Ireland sold 600 million euros of five-year bonds at a yield of 0.09 percent and another 650 million euros of nine-year bonds at a yield of 1.03 percent, the National Treasury Management Agency debt office said in a statement.

The country plans to issue between 9 and 13 billion euros of long-term debt this year, a slight increase on 2016. The NTMA's head of funding said last month that the scarcity of ECB bonds had "not particularly" influenced the size of January's issue.

Ireland can continue to participate in the bond-buying programme for the remainder of 2017 at an average monthly purchase rate of 500 million euros provided the NTMA issues close to the upper end of its funding target range, Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Ryan McGrath forecast.

The last time Ireland sold a bond maturing in 2022 in May last year, it did so at a yield of 0.16 percent but the NTMA only had to offer half of Thursday's rate - 0.5 percent - when it sold 1 billion euros of 2026 bonds four months ago.

Ireland has taken advantage of record low funding rates over the past two years to issue longer-dated debt at progressively lower cost, stretching out the maturity of its stock of debt.

But yields across the euro zone have been on the rise recently.

Irish 10-year debt rose back above 1 percent on secondary markets last month, having fallen as low as 0.3 percent last September. Yields soared past 15 percent in 2011, while Ireland was in the early stages of a three-year bailout programme. .

(Editing by Catherine Evans)