Peter Mathews (Dublin South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I hope it will be a conversation, with a mixture of speech and questions. I thank the witnesses for coming in.

The story of how Anglo Irish Bank and the Irish Nationwide Building Society merged to become the IBRC is amazing.

In 2006, in Davos, the world's richest, most powerful and so-called most intelligent people lauded Anglo Irish Bank as the best banking model in the world, with a balance sheet of approximately €100 billion, as shown in these excellent bar graphs which I find very helpful for seeing at a glance what has happened on the balance sheet from then to now. The bank had €100 billion of assets and was lauded as the best bank in the world. Now, under Mr. Dukes's chairmanship and executive management, this has been shrunk to just over €50 billion, which includes a large chunk of the remaining €28 billion of promissory notes, the asset that was created to allow the emergency liquidity assistance, ELA, to be advanced to redeem the losses of the investors or bondholders. As Deputy Higgins pointed out, he was one of the first on the European stage to put the case to Mr. Barroso that it was wrong for Irish citizens to be saddled with investor losses.

The €31 billion of promissory notes, now reduced to €28 billion, has a headline rate of interest that is the income for IBRC. According to Karl Whelan, over the period of the promissory notes, that will amount to approximately €18 billion. Therefore, that €18 billion in projected income is offset against the estimate of losses to the end of IBRC's life. If we take even half of that €18 billion and add it to the €25 billion - the estimate of losses that will be found buried in the Anglo experience - that will amount to €34 billion as the losses that originated out of Anglo. That brings us to the stage now where the funding has changed and the citizens of Ireland are administering a drip to inject money to redeem the losses of the replacing creditor, the euro system and the Central Bank of Ireland, who gave the investors the get-out-of-jail-free card. This is not pleasant.

This brings me back to a question for the IBRC. Is it not logical, financially and arithmetically, that it should be possible to negotiate on this? It should be possible to make the case to Europe that we plugged the hole in the framework, stopped it falling to the ground and, therefore, deserve some reduction in the bill that is being laid totally on the backs of the Irish people. We deserve that on the basis that the arithmetic can do it. This is not a financially complex process that will take 40 or 30 years. It simply requires the creditor - the Central Bank - to agree to buy in and not seek-----