Michael D'Arcy (Wexford, Fine Gael)

I cannot let it go. The three disciples of Cowenology who have just left the Chamber attempted to blame the Opposition for the mess they and their predecessors created.

On the matter of the previous Financial Regulator, Mr. Neary, I take a different view from that of most people. I agree that he did not do his job. However, we must remember that we are in a single-party State. Fianna Fáil has been in Government in different guises for 23 of the past 25 years. This single-party State appointed people to positions of authority, including the office of the Financial Regulator. Here was a man who should have done his job but chose not to, and we can see the consequences of that. How could he have done his job? The regulator of financial services within the State would have been going against everything the then Taoiseach, Deputy Bertie Ahern, and his first lieutenant, the Minister for Finance, were saying. We must remember these were the people who said some economists should commit suicide rather than commenting adversely on the state of the Irish economy. That was the backdrop beneath which the regulator - a civil servant, a man appointed by a single-party Government - was supposed to operate. There were no circumstances in which he could operate because he would not have been allowed to say what was required. The pity is that the regulator we have now, Mr. Elderfield, was not available at that stage.

A number of our banks are guaranteed by the State, but others are trading under the auspices of the Financial Regulator without being guaranteed by the State. I would like to have information on the credit committees of all those financial institutions. These are the people who lent insane amounts of money to people to buy houses in developments that could never survive. The moment the downturn came and the markets slowed these people were going to fall off the cliff - and, by God, they fell off the cliff.

There has been a certain amount of talk about the Garda. I do not want to prejudice any upcoming case, but I do not believe any Garda Commissioner would go before a Dáil committee and say he or she did not have sufficient resources to deal with this problem - not under any circumstances. However, it is more than 12 months since the headquarters of Anglo Irish Bank were raided by the Garda. Justice delayed is justice denied.

I will finish with a quote from Benjamin Franklin who, 250 years ago, said: "When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic." The auction politics engaged in by Fianna Fáil, particularly in the 2002-2007 Administration, showed that the people were voting themselves money. We had benchmarking, pay rises, social welfare increases and increased funding to every area on the basis of Charlie McCreevy's "When I have it, I spend it" philosophy. They have spent it in style and now we have nothing left. We should remember the quotation from Benjamin Franklin: "When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic." However, it will not herald the end of this Republic; this nation survived the Famine and we will survive this. There is €100 million of taxpayers' money in deposit accounts which can be used. There is much negativity and we must show there is a future, but that will not come from the Government side.

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