eCos interrupts (PIE in status register =0)

Hi all,
my (timer) interrupt didn't work until I figured out, that bit 0 (PIE) in
the status register is set to 0.
So after all of my initialization stuff is done, I set that bit to 1.
The system works, however any program interruption through gdb frontend
is end of story - gdb frontend says "trap" and can't find
the proper breakpoint address then.
It is quite possible that I something messed up, as during
investigation of the problem I added some assembly
to eCos HAL (LED blinking in vectors.S).

My solution is rather hack so my question is,
is there a _clean_ way to enable global interrupts on eCos?
Note that I use eCos from github & zylin howto.

Thanks,
Michal