Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I want to thank you and the members of the committee for the invitation to be here today.

In my written statement, I've set out in detail my analysis of the causes of the banking crisis. In brief, I agree with the assessment in the Regling and Watson report that while the crisis, clearly, had an international dimension, this was very much, unfortunately, a homemade crisis in many respects. The economic crisis, of which the banking crisis was an integral part, I think, for the Irish people it can be viewed as a tragedy in three acts. In act 1, the key decisions which led to the crisis were made by the Government, the banks and the Financial Regulator. In act 2 came the unravelling of the solvency of the banking system. This was also the point at which the then Government made the fateful decision to provide the bank guarantee. This was the most damaging and expensive decision in terms of the cost of dealing with the crisis, which unfolded in act 3.

The decision to provide a blanket guarantee was made with effect from 30 September 2008. It's a matter of record that at the end of the subsequent Dáil debate, the Labour Party was the only party to oppose the guarantee. We did so because we believed that the extent of the potential liability posed a real risk to the solvency of the State and I believe that this decision has been fully vindicated by subsequent events. The banking guarantee locked the country into a cycle which led to the bailout of 2010 and everything that flowed from that date. In looking at how the crisis arose, cheap credit became available in Ireland after the adoption of the euro. As Regling and Watson identified, much of this lending was concentrated on the property sector and comprised loans to a limited number of developers. This pattern of lending was reckless in the extreme and it should have prompted intervention by the Financial Regulator. However, no such intervention occurred. The practice of light-touch regulation prevailed and, with the benefit of hindsight, it's also clear - not least from the contributions made in this forum - that a measure of regulatory capture applied.

Put simply, the regulator, the regulation system and structure was too close to the banks.

During the Dáil debate in 2003 on the Bill to establish the Irish Financial Regulator, I said, "The Bill does not refer to the necessity for parameters and ethical criteria for responsible lending. This is a major deficiency." Tax based incentives put in place by Government spurred on the reckless lending. I believe that tax-based incentives can play a legitimate and a very positive role in stimulating development in certain circumstances, such as to encourage necessary, social or economic development, particularly where the market has failed to do so. Any such incentive, though, has to be proportionate, targeted and temporary. However, by the time I became the finance spokesperson of the Labour Party, which was in late 2002, appointed by Deputy Rabbitte to the opposition and for some time before that, it was very clear many of these tax incentives had actually run their course. It was also clear that their continued use was stroking ... stoking a construction industry which was already overheated and a bubble in land prices which itself, the bubble, was aided and abetted by grossly irresponsible rezoning decisions in some parts of the country.

In my Second Stage speech on the Finance Bill in February 2003, I said: "The Minister for Finance is obviously a disciple of the Augustinian school. He always announces his steadfast determination to dismantle the bewildering edifices of tax shelters but [he] is never quite ready to do [so]". My prediction, I think, proved, you know, prescient, as year after year, the Minister constantly found reasons to delay their expiry. I repeatedly stressed my view that the incentives were being used as a tax shelter rather than as a development tool and they were being used by wealthy individuals to shelter income from Revenue. I pointed out in my 2006 reply to the budget, more than 1,000 of Ireland's wealthiest people paid ... these were people with incomes in excess of a million euros a year, paid an effective tax rate of between nought and 5%.

I believed that the Government of the day was, as I said at the time, addicted to tax shelters. No doubt, this was, in part, a matter of political judgment and prejudice, but I believed then, and I still believe, that the reliance of the principal Government party on financial contributions from developers also played a part. The culture of the Galway tent was unhealthy for politics and it contributed to pushing the building industry ultimately to disaster.

Also during this time, I pointed to what I considered to be abuses of the stamp duty regime to reduce the liability of wealthy individuals. Amongst those abuses was the practices of resting contracts, whereby the parties to a particular agreement delayed or avoided the execution of a stampable document so as to reduce or to avoid or to postpone almost indefinitely liability. Another abuse was the use of contracts for difference, which I highlighted in 2006. The committee will be aware that a proposal for a modest duty - 1% - on such contracts was withdrawn by the Minister for Finance, Brian Cowen, following extensive lobbying from finance and other industry sources.

Contracts for difference were subsequently used by investors in Anglo Irish Bank, with disastrous consequences. Had the duty been in place, it might have given - the 1% ... it might have given some of those involved pause for thought.

The budget was in surplus in every year from '97 to 2007, with the exception of 2002. And, in fact, when the previous rainbow Government handled over, there was a very small surplus on the budget.

Contemporary estimates of the structural balance by the EU Commission, the IMF, and the OECD did not identify a problem. The large disparity between the apparently healthy headline figures and the underlying reality was accounted for by the over-reliance on construction related taxes that the committee members are well aware of - stamps, CAT, VAT, CGT, all elements of the bubble in tax revenues. This over-reliance on construction-related taxes was the root cause of the collapse in the national finances, which occurred in 2008, and subsequently. The problem was compounded by the fact that the budget policy was driven by the electoral cycle rather than by the needs of the economy. It's no coincidence that the peaks in public spending occurred immediately before the 2002 and the 2007 general elections.

I've been asked to comment specifically on the oversight role of the Oireachtas in the period under review and my colleague, Deputy Rabbitte, has dealt with it in detail. The primary role of the Opposition is to hold the Government to account. I believe that the Dáil and the Seanad have generally served us well but they're far from perfect. Our system is adversarial - Government proposes and Opposition usually opposes. One of the reasons behind the establishment of the committee system was to provide a less adversarial setting for debate. In recent years, it has become normal practice for independent regulators to be made accountable to the Oireachtas in the first instance and while this practice is right in principle, it's important that committees are sufficiently resourced to enable members to carry out their duties effectively. The accountability of the Financial Regulator is a case in point.

It seems that in the run-up to the banking crisis, everyone concerned, including the Taoiseach, Government Ministers, senior civil servants and the Oireachtas, presumed that the regulator was doing its job and that the assurances of banking stability did not warrant serious investigation. This assumption proved to be fatefully wrong and Deputy Rabbitte has traced the evolution of the committee system after the DIRT inquiry. The system now is better equipped to do its job than it was ten years ago. Nevertheless, it's still debatable if a better resource system of Oireachtas oversight would or could have pointed up the potential dangers facing the banking system before the crisis hit. Equally, I doubt if our current Oireachtas oversight could prevent a similar crisis happening again if those who are primarily responsible for preventing such crisis - the Government, the Central Bank, the Department of Finance - were blind to its very existence. You know, I'm very conscious of raising through questions, through statements, through contributions to committees and to the Dail a whole series of issues, some of which I've referenced to there, but, you know, I was doing that as an Opposition Deputy on behalf of the Labour Party.

So, better resourcing of the committee system is important if we're to empower the Oireachtas in its dealings with the Executive. And I would say, if your inquiry is minded to make such a recommendation, then I, as leader of the Labour Party, will give the recommendations, in that respect, very serious consideration. Thank you.