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

I apologise for my late arrival. One has to bi-locate and tri-locate in this place when one is in a small party. Having listened to some of the discussion, I have not fully developed an expert understanding of what is being discussed so I am on a learning curve. However, I would be very anxious and suspicious about all of this. The labyrinthine and opaque world of international finance is quite terrifying.

Its capacity to unleash devastation on economies, really out of the blue as far as ordinary citizens are concerned, is a big problem. That the vast majority of participants in the economy can suddenly be devastatingly affected by the ebbs, flows and shifts of international capital is one lesson we should draw from the recent bubble and burst. Private capital moves into areas where it thinks it can make a quick buck and it moves out just as fast when over investment in those areas leads to a bubble and a crash. So one gets over-investment at one point and then an investment retrenchment and flight at another point. On the face of it, this is just facilitating that process. It is actually making a bad situation worse. If one can pin point who are the investors and if there is a relationship between the investor and the enterprise, then one feels there is some transparency and maybe some potential to control investment. What we seem to be talking about here is facilitating anonymous investment from people who happen to have savings or accumulated capital, all over Europe, in different places, and who then throw their money into some vehicle, which will then invest it on the basis of getting a maximum return at any given point in time in another place. So there is no relationship at all between the real economy and the investor. To my mind that is just what led us into the mess in the first place. So, sell me this, but I really do not see the advantage of it. Can I put it to the witnesses, the problem which lies at the back of this, so far as I understood from the finance representative who was before the committee earlier-----