Eamon Ryan (Dublin South, Green Party)

I look forward to this opportunity to speak on the statement issued by the Minister for Finance today on the banking crisis. No doubt it is a real crisis. As the Minister for Finance stated this morning, the figures that have been revealed are horrific and numbing in the sense of their scale and their implications for every person in this country. There is deep regret, and rightly, deep anger, at that level of legacy from a property bubble and banking failure in this country that has cost us dear. We must work out now how we get out of that, how we recover as a country, how we manage it and where we go on from here to get our economy working again and get people working again.

It was both a liquidity crisis and a solvency crisis. Sometimes people argue that it was one versus the other; it was both, in real depth. The liquidity position of our banks fed into the solvency crisis. It was that ease of access to money, coming in many instances from international banks in the European Union, pension funds and local authorities and other sources, in such large volumes into the Irish economy which created a liquidity pattern of excess access to short-term resources that ended up in helping create our solvency problem in the misguided banking model which built on that, taking those short-term liabilities and matching them with long-term assets that did not have the real value that people thought they had at the time. This has been both a liquidity and a solvency crisis and in a sense, I would argue, it was the nature of the liquidity system we set up, the huge reliance on short-term cash deposits in our banks, that was one of the fundamental causes of the problems.

In looking at the various different options to solving that problem, in looking at what could have been done, I want to reflect on some of the other options that may have been available and that were correctly and honestly presented, and maybe give some reasoning that I would have as to why they were not taken, and, indeed, I believe, would not have been the right options.

First, when the immediate liquidity and solvency crisis became apparent - in fairness, there were some people who saw it coming in advance and called it for what it was - to everyone in September 2008 and the unsustainability of the model became exposed, I suppose there was the "let them go" option, which was to let the whole thing crash. However, we must take cognisance of the fact-----

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