Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

I apologise for stepping outside briefly. If I am repeating someone else's question, please tell me that it was answered and I will move on. I do not want to waste anyone's time.

I will ask a general question first. We are four or five years down the road from the crash, but I have put a question to everyone, including the troika, to which I have not received an answer. Perhaps Mr. Dukes, a public interest director, will be the first. Anglo Irish Bank was a nest of speculation to an acute degree. Fortunes were made by private individuals while the going was good. When it crashed, it was landed on the shoulders of the working class - the poor, the pensioners and the workers. What is the moral justification for crucifying our taxpayers with destructive austerity to bail out speculators?

Let me protest in passing. When many people are suffering so much, that any bank, be it private or public, is paying hundreds of thousands of euro, much less €500,000 or millions, to top executives is obscene.

Ordinary people, including me, can be bamboozled by discussions on promissory notes and the merry-go-round of bonds, notes, etc. If €3.1 billion must be paid each March, and setting aside the various manoeuvrings in that regard, what are the mechanics of it and how will it be paid? In a few sentences, will Mr. Dukes reprise the story of the €31 billion that constitutes the promissory notes? Where did it come from and where has it gone in recent years? If the State asserted that the amount was a burden too far on the people and that it would stop further payments, what would the consequences be apart from apoplexy in the EU establishment and among the sharks in the financial markets?