Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

-----it involves financial engineering and doing the serious and hard work necessary to provide us with a banking system that will operate properly and provide credit. Unfortunately, that is not what the Government has provided during the past three years. I argued with the Taoiseach when he was Minister for Finance about contracts for difference. I told him it would turn the Irish Stock Exchange, consisting of a small number of shares concentrated in banks property and construction, into a casino, and I got the brush off. Month in and month out I told him that the property-based tax breaks were blowing up a financial bubble, but he would not believe it. I subsequently repeatedly told him that what was happening in the models for growth we were witnessing was unsustainable. The former Taoiseach told us that it constituted talking down the economy and people doing so should go off and commit suicide.

Today is a day if infamy in Ireland; it is black Thursday. We have heard about €50 billion of costs and losses to be borne on the backs of the poor Irish people in this generation, the next generation and probably generations still to be born. This week the Germans finally finished paying off their war debt, not arising from the Second World War but from the First World War. This is the legacy Fianna Fáil is now proposing to place on us. It was announced not to our native Parliament of which, for all its faults, we are all so proud and for which our forefathers fought to get, but to the Financial Times of London, while the Taoiseach sat where the Minister is now sitting and told Deputies Kenny and Gilmore he knew nothing about it.

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