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

I thank the Minister and his colleagues for attending. Three things struck me when I looked through the paper. The two main reinforced steel joists of the meeting are the capitalisation of the banks and the role of a central European banking supervisor. The rest of the issues are packed in around those two issues. There is a darkening shadow of debt over Europe. Politicians across the eurozone are beginning to understand that there has been a criminal capture by the financial system of the budgets of eurozone countries. The financial transactions tax might have had an earlier origin with other ideas for funding different efforts across European Union countries, but it is now essentially converting itself into an insurance fund for banks. They get the uneasy feeling that the balance sheets of the 6,000 banks across the eurozone are not as healthy as they have tried to fool everybody about. We had our own banks in last week. The sort of good news from Anglo Irish Bank was that the final estimate of its loan losses might be €25 billion, rather than between €29 billion and €36 billion. That is patently disproved by the facts. It had a €74 billion loan book at the start of the collapse. Half of that is €37 billion. There is going to be a loss of €37 billion, regardless of the mirrored corridors of accounting. When they said their final estimate is €25 billion, that was after taking credit for approximately €17 billion of interest on promissory notes over the term of those notes.