Pearse Doherty (Donegal South West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Chairman, the Minister and his officials to our first meeting of 2014. I hope they had a nice break before facing into the challenges that 2014 presents. Deputy Michael McGrath touched on many of these and there are probably more, including ones that have not yet been identified but will raise their heads over 2014. When we gather here in 2015 we will have to have seen big progress in four key areas. I do not wish to deny any of the other issues affecting NAMA’s stress testing of the banks but there are four issues on which the Department, and the Minister as its driver, need to see big progress. First is the mortgage arrears crisis. It is deeply depressing and frustrating that we are so far into a financial crisis, with the collapse of property prices and the number of people in mortgage arrears, yet the latest figures from the Department of Finance show that 83% of people in arrears have not received a long-term sustainable offer. That is not acceptable and should have been resolved long before now. I engage with the banks as an Opposition spokesperson and it is clear that the energy does not exist within them to resolve the crisis. We cannot continue to drag our heels down this road. There are far too many families looking for solutions. It is important not only for them, for their financial situation and mental health, but also for the banks themselves. The stress tests may pose a major challenge for those institutions later on this year.

The second point is the need for real growth in the economy. The growth projections put forward by the Department of Finance, since the Minister took office almost three years ago, have not all been met. The original growth projections for where this economy should be today have not been met. My analysis is that the austerity policy of this Government has strangled the potential for growth. I am conscious that external factors in respect of our trading partners have also had a major impact. We can refer to the statistics and projections in 2011 for growth last year which simply have not materialised. Any bit of growth is to be welcomed. We need to grab it with both hands. If we were to turn back the clock a couple of years and project the levels of growth, unemployment, long-term unemployment, emigration, mortgage arrears that we have today I do not believe we would have followed the policy direction that was followed because the consequences are too great.

The third area in which we need to see major progress is the national debt. The key point is to ensure that we have an outcome from the agreement made at that famous June summit to separate bank and sovereign debt. It is my view, and I hope I will be proved wrong, that the Minister is giving up the ghost on that agreement and that it is more likely that the Department’s policy agenda is to make the banks as profitable as they can be, which involves not writing off debt, increasing fees and what not, and trying to get some external partner to buy into the banks, instead of fulfilling the commitment of the European Stability Mechanism, ESM, to pay the money back to the State that we put into it as a result of our decision to save the rest of the European banking system from the contagion.

Many Government spokespersons have painted a rosy picture of what is to be presented in budget 2015 but unless I am wrong the Minister still plans to take €1 billion from this year’s budget. The one simple thing that has been missing from this process is fairness. There are ways, as we have shown each year, to reduce the deficit to the required amount but to do so in a fair manner that would sustain growth. Those issues, mortgage distress, growth in the economy, the national debt and banking, and fairness need to be resolved.

This year this committee and the Department will hopefully face the challenge of the banking inquiry. I am sure that many people are deeply frustrated that we have not had one heretofore. My stated position, and that of our party, is that the public really wants those who were involved in inappropriate behaviour to be held accountable before the courts, not before this committee. There has lately been some movement in that direction and justice will take its course. It is deeply worrying that two of the eight documents on the recapitalisation of the banks have gone missing in the Department of Finance. I hope that the Minister can shed some light on that. We are here considering the Estimates for the Department and I am not casting any aspersions on the staff in that Department because I have seen their work in dealing with the challenges facing the State. However, over a period of two months before the bank guarantee and four months after that only eight items of communication passed between the governors or chairpersons of the covered institutions and the Minister for Finance, two of which have disappeared or cannot be found.

The only reason we know those two cannot be found is that the document was requested under the freedom of information provisions on two separate occasions. I worry about documents that were never requested under freedom of information. If the journalist in 2009 had never requested that document and if I had not made a freedom of information request for the correspondence between the governors and chairpersons of the banks and the Minister for Finance during that period those documents would simply not have seen the light of day and they would not have been recorded. I ask the Minister to explain to the committee how documents of that nature could go missing.