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

I have a few questions that follow from that. I was just contextualising it.

We do have taxes on other areas. It is not just stamp duty on shares but every time a person writes a cheque. It must be remembered that tax was introduced at a time when writing cheques was a large part of transactions in this economy. All businesses wrote cheques. That is the reason they got the revenue out of those transactions. They were financial transactions. The euro-dollar market, which was the forerunner of the capital markets and inter-bank markets, had not started. We must get stuck in, come up with fresh ideas and say we need an FDIC in Europe to complement the supervisory banking process that must come in by 1 January. We need to properly assess and spring clean the 6,000 banks across Europe. It may be that a minimum of €3 trillion is needed. In European terms we should start thinking about getting that mutualised funded and perhaps perpetualised funded with no redemptions of principal in the way the councils post the First World War were funded on a perpetual-----