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

On the face of it, this is a good idea to avoid the necessity for the people to bail out the banks again by getting the banks to put money aside each year and mutualise it across Europe such that there will be a fund to bail out any bank that fails, meaning that we will not be on the hook again. The principle is reasonable. Banking systems can collapse in big as well as small countries. In the event of a banking collapse in Germany, could Irish banks be put in a very difficult position as a consequence? If the fund were to be used up entirely to prop up banks in a big country, the money would have to be replenished, an extra call would have to be made on the banks here and, consequently, the costs would somehow find their way back to the customers of these banks. Is that correct? Such a situation would be far more difficult for us than the other way around because big countries could absorb this better than relatively small ones with relatively small banking systems.