Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

He is a master at this. The Minister will attend two meetings for which we have the agenda and it seems entirely legitimate to ask questions about both meetings in advance of them. The idea that there is some kind of iron wall between the Thursday and the Friday meetings does not make sense to me. On Thursday, at 10.30 a.m. there will be a macro-economic dialogue at political level. That seems to be pretty open as to what can be discussed in terms of the overall economic situation in Europe and how we fit into that. We will then have the Eurogroup meeting and then there will be the ECOFIN meeting with the agenda items he has gone through and which he clearly wants to focus on, so that we do not discuss the other stuff. Even in terms of the ECOFIN meeting, the main agenda item which will be discussed for ten or 12 hours is banking union.

Is the Minister telling us that it is not relevant to a discussion on banking union to discuss the retroactive recapitalisation of banks? I put it to the Minister that it is absolutely legitimate to raise it in that context because in so far as this issue has been presented to us, the whole narrative has been that if we sort out banking union, if we make progress towards banking union, then we will get some retroactive recapitalisation support for our banks which will lessen our debt burden. I do not see why the Minister cannot raise it in the context of discussing the progress on banking union which he is reporting. If he cannot do it there I certainly do not see why he cannot discuss it in a macro-economic dialogue at political level. I ask him to clarify why he could not raise it in one or other of those contexts.