Peter Mathews (Dublin South, Independent) | Oireachtas source

That is grand. I like the big-picture stuff because that is the engineering in terms of the work at hand.

Ninety percent of the €17 billion in sales - which were not at par value but at discounted prices - have gone to American funds and investors. Think about this. Are they the only guys with money, because of the quantitative easing that occurred in America, with cash sloshing around? They see headlines saying that Ireland is surviving the austerity era and that there is growth. Senator Lorraine Higgins said there had been a dramatic turnaround. There is no dramatic turnaround. Seán O'Driscoll of Glen Dimplex, who has a realistic head on his shoulders, said this morning on the radio, I am told, that we should put caution with a capital "C" in front of all of this stuff about turnarounds. If there was a turnaround, everybody would be quite happy to pay the water charges. They are not, because they ain't got the cash. They also have to pay property tax. I got my local property tax form yesterday; if one is paying by cheque or debit, the deadline is 31 December or 1 January. If one allows the Revenue Commissioners to dip into one's bank account to collect the full lump sum then the deadline is 25 March 2015. Those are two biggies coming down the track for households.

Let me return to discussing the Americans. Ninety percent of €17 billion is €17.2 billion. These American guys, probably six or seven of them, had to sell dollars to buy euro - they had tonnes of dollars because it was sloshing around - to invest in a euro asset which they saw as upside because everybody was saying in the headlines that Ireland had made it. The people of Ireland still have that secret ticking time bomb in Patrick Honohan's desk - the €25 billion of promissory bonds. If he starts selling them, he will spoil the opportunity to cancel them, if the Government had the mettle, courage, balls - I might as well say it - to tear them up and tell Mr. Draghi he has got a little problem to mutualise and spread across Europe, and rightly so, because Tim Geithner caused that scar. We were the firebreak in that eurozone forest fire that stopped the contagion when Italy was panicking and Italian banks were holding Italian bonds, the use of which had gone through the roof.

This big-picture story needs to be told again because it is the best argument, the best objective evidence, to support the case. When I hear the term "retrospective bank capitalisation", I think "What a mouthful of syllables that mean nothing." It is tearing up a false liability, which was the metamorphosis of bank losses from one bank alone into a burden on the Irish people to act as a firebreak in the financial system. Come on, guys. I said to the Minister for Finance only last week: "Come on. Do it, please. Please do it."