Enda Kenny (Mayo, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Go raibh maith agat a Chathaoirligh. Tá mé buíoch díot as ucht an cuireadh teacht anseo agus tá mé sásta a bheith ag freastal ar an ... ag an chomhcoiste. I am pleased to appear before the Joint Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis following the direction, which was given pursuant to section 67 of the House of the Oireachtas (Inquiries, Privileges and Procedures) Act 2013, by you as Chairman. We would hope that the inquiry can generate new insights into the cause of the banking crash and related collapse, that help policy-makers ensure that a mistake and mistakes made at that time are never again repeated.

I've been asked to appear here in my capacity as leader of Fine Gael, between 2002 and 2007, specifically in relation to the areas that you've mentioned, the effectiveness of the Oireachtas in scrutinising public policy on the banking sector and on the economy. Secondly, analysis of the main drivers for budgetary policy and thirdly, the appropriateness of the relationships between Government, the Oireachtas, the banking and the property sector, as you've outlined, Chairman.

Prior to my election as leader of Fine Gael in 2002, Fine Gael had been in government previous to that, between 1994 and 1997, during which time I served as Minister for Tourism and Trade.

As a Government ... that Government, comprised of three parties, secured modest public expenditure growth, budgeted for the first Government surplus in a generation and delivered a rapid reduction in Government debt, from 84% of GNP in 1994 down 20% to 64% of GNP in 1997. Obviously, at that time the Government secured Ireland's entry into economic and monetary union and the adoption of the euro as our currency. Economic growth averaged over 7% per year, driven primarily by a very strong performance in exports, which rose to 73% of our GDP - which was an exceptionally high proportion by any international standards. That Government maintained a focus on manufacturing, on exports and on cost control in all areas and between '93 and '97, inflation averaged approximately 2%, which was consistent with the maintenance of international competitiveness - which is so important. In the 1990s, this country doubled its share of the world export market and foreign direct investment flows into Ireland increased significantly.

When the Government changed in 1997, we passed on an economy in which rapid growth had been underpinned by sound public finances, strong productivity, employment growth and a vibrant export-orientated industrial base and unemployment had dropped to below 9%. We met all those necessary economic conditions to adopt the euro, which was a new, strong currency ... a stable currency, with low interest rates to be used by ... eventually by over 500 million people. Ireland looked forward to building a more competitive, inclusive, innovative economy as a platform for long-term prosperity, stability and, as a consequence, social cohesion.

So following the completion of the EMU and the formal circulation of the euro in 2001, the underlying dynamics of the Irish economy shifted dramatically ... dramatically in the following decade. Particularly in the period 2002 to 2007 and particularly with regard to the changed contribution to Irish economic growth from exports and domestic spending. Very important in that was the significant tax incentives that were introduced and subsequently extended beyond the lifespan originally agreed for property investment, things like multi-story car parks, student accommodation, buildings used for third level education, hotels, holiday camps, holiday cottages, rural-urban renewal park-and-ride facilities, living over the shop, nursing homes, private hospitals, convalescent facilities, sports injuries clinics and child care facilities and so on. All of these diluted the previous policy bias in favour of manufacturing and exporting activities. Public spending became a major driver of economic growth, increasing by an astonishing €23 billion between 2002 and 2007. The rate of growth that averaged 10% per year and credit conditions, particularly for mortgages ... they also eased as banks began to borrow more cheaply from abroad under EMU rules. And there were no measures taken either by the national European authorities to impose appropriate lending rules to protect economic stability generally and young families buying their first homes in particular. Household borrowing, as the inquiry will be aware, more than doubled between 2003 and 2007, with this country, Ireland, becoming the second most indebted country in the eurozone by 2007.

Ireland's current account balance - the difference between foreign earnings and foreign expenditure - went from a surplus of €1.9 billion to a deficit of €10.1 billion by 2007 as Irish households began to spend far more than they were earning. Our share of world trade began to decline significantly from 2002 as domestic cost inflation accelerated, with the loss of market share most acute in the manufacturing sector. And from 2000 onwards, most new Irish jobs came from domestic as opposed to exporting sectors, particularly the public sector and construction. Manufacturing and agriculture lost almost 50,000 jobs between 2000 and 2006.

And by 2004 the numbers of people working in the construction sector overtook for the first time the numbers of people working in the manufacturing sector, and by 2006 the percentage of the workforce working in the construction sector was actually higher than any other industrialised country. So by 2007 you had an uncompetitive, bloated, over-borrowed and distorted Irish economy had been left at the mercy of subsequent international events, without the safeguards, institutions and mindset that were needed to survive and to prosper as a small, open economy within a changed euro area. By this point, the economic costs of the banking and wider collapse had already been incurred, even if the true scale of that economic disaster would take several more years to fully reveal itself.

So as is evident from the key speeches and policy documents dating from this period, under my own leadership, our party, the Fine Gael Party, which was the main Opposition party June 2002 to 2007, opposed the main strands of Government economic policy mentioned already, and our Dáil Members voted against the passage of every budget as a consequence. Notable components of our economic policy evidenced from this period were: our opposition as a party to the Government's changes to the structures for financial regulation introduced in 2002; our warnings to the then Government regarding the deterioration in the country's international competitiveness, and, in particular, the rapid price and rapid cost escalation taking place in the closed sectors of our economy; our campaign which we called, "Rip Off Ireland", at the time highlighted the growing divergence in price and cost levels for consumers and businesses between Ireland and our trading partners; we had regular demands for proper cost-benefit analysis to be applied to the proliferation of tax shelters and incentives, particularly for the property sector; and our campaigns to highlight the scale of Government waste of taxpayers' money as public expenditure escalated very rapidly, most notably in our opposition to the Government's decentralisation plan. The "Buck Stops Here" campaign set out by Fine Gael's proposals for securing better value for the taxpayer in the delivery of public services and infrastructure spoke for itself; our critique of the entire budgetary process, and the lack of opportunity for the Oireachtas to properly scrutinise and assess the tax and spending options available to the Government were a very sore point with us; our opposition to the Government's public sector benchmarking pay deals, reflecting the lack of transparency and the failure to link the deals to genuine changes in work practices and improvements in productivity.

So a generalised critique of economic policy by our party during this period was that the then Government was abandoning the competitive, export-oriented, flexible economic model needed to prosper inside the economic and monetary union, and that had been bequeathed to it by the previous Fine Gael-led Government. And that was an economic model built on sound public finances, high productivity, strong policy support for foreign direct investment and the traded sectors of the economy.

The ability of the Oireachtas to scrutinise all of these things was hampered by the bypassing of public representatives as a result of the dominance of social partnership, where all these decisions were made away from the Oireachtas. Government choices in all key policy areas were removed from any kind of scrutiny. The absence at that time of a clear, national, statutory fiscal framework and expenditure rule to ensure sustainable management of the public finances, and the absence of an independent watchdog to police management of the public finances and to highlight any risks that were there. The absence of any requirement at that time to conduct and publish cost benefit analysis of tax shelters and major infrastructure projects, and to subject all major expenditure programmes to regular review; we had overruns on a regular basis.

Restrictions that were introduced in the Freedom of Information Act. So total public spending during the 2002-2007 period increased by €23 billion. The average annual growth rate, at just under 10% per year, was roughly twice the underlying potential growth rate of the economy. And, therefore, the disastrous impact on the underlying health of the public finances was camouflaged by the temporary and unsustainable surge in transaction tax receipts from the credit fuelled construction and property bubbles. For the main, social, political and economic drivers of the growth in Government expenditure were the genuine need to increase investment level in physical infrastructure to address capacity constraints in the Irish economy - we've mentioned some of these - and to support regional development to keep the economy moving throughout the entire country, though it was even clear then that much of the investment was being wasted because of the absence of public sector procurement and project management expertise.

Secondly, the need for public sector salaries to chase the rising cost of living, which in turn reflected the uncompetitive and the closed nature of many sectors of the Irish economy, as well as the rising cost of public services. And those rising costs of the public service should of course have been mitigated by a much stronger drive to secure public sector efficiencies, particularly in the health service and the amalgamation of the health boards into the HSE. That opportunity was lost as a result of the Government's public sector pay benchmarking deals. The doubling of the social welfare budget during 2001 and 2007, at a time of rapidly rising employment, and while there was a genuine need to reduce poverty among vulnerable groups like the elderly, children, the disabled and so on, the rapid rise in payments to working age adults reflected the complete absence of activation reforms that were needed to lower the exceptional rate of jobless households in Ireland, even at a time when the country was allegedly enjoying full employment. The absence at that time of a clear national strategy fiscal framework and expenditure rules to ensure sustainable management of the public finances and the absence of an independent watchdog to police management of the public finances and highlight risks. If the expenditure rule enacted by the current Government, which caps expenditure growth of the underlying potential growth rate of the economy had been adhered to in that period, then spending growth would have been less than half of the 130% increase actually incurred.

Then there was the political cycle unconstrained by any independently-policed set of credible fiscal rules. Budgetary policy during that period was as a result driven by the needs of the electoral rather than the economic cycle. Public spending without any reform increased rapidly up to the 2002 election. Voted spending was up by 21% in 2001, 14% in 2002 and the lead into the 2007 election, up by 13% in 2007. So not only would tighter management of public spending during this period have helped moderate economic overheating at a time of growing risk, it would also have helped to leave the public finances in a much stronger position to protect living standards and the economy from the effects of the property bust and collapse in the construction sector. It has of course been documented that the Fine Gael Party in the 2007 election adopted broadly similar assumptions as the then Government about economic growth, about tax receipts, about public spending over the subsequent five-year Dáil term. These assumptions were drawn from the contemporaneous projections by the Department of Finance and by the Economic and Social Research Institute and our assessment at the time was that these projections were credible on the basis of a steady managed transition back to the competitive export-orientated economic model that drove Ireland's strong and sustainable recovery during the 1990s.

It has been alleged, Chairman, that a relatively small clique of bankers and property owners were able to bring influence on policy-making at that time to secure taxpayer support to favoured sectors and to favoured institutions. This is a matter of public interest for the inquiry to pursue and obviously you will make your own findings. Whatever the truth of the allegations, it is clear that there were features of Irish politics and Irish policy-making system at that time that left it vulnerable to such perceptions. Things like the ability of the Ministers for Finance to introduce or extend tax breaks for favourite sectors of the economy, particularly the property and construction sectors, without published detailed assessments by the Department of Finance or scrutiny indeed by the Oireachtas.

The excessively close relationship between the Central Bank and the Department of Finance at that time and between the Financial Regulator and the institutions that it was charged with regulating. The ambiguity between the relative roles of the Central Bank and the Financial Services Regulatory Authority, when it came to policing the stability of the banking system and protecting consumers and depositors, the corporate funding of political parties to varying degrees during this period, the dilution by the then Government of the Freedom of Information Act, the absence of clear enforcible rules regarding the jobs that could be taken up in the private sector by former Ministers, advisers and civil servants and the absence of any institution to police the resulting conflicts of interest that arose. The lack of transparency and rules regarding the lobbying of public officials by special interest groups, the absence of effective planning regulation at that time and the absence of structured institutionalised national risk assessment processes. So in conclusion, by meeting all of the economic conditions needed in 1997 to adopt a new strong and stable currency with the low interest rates used by the people of the European Union, the Irish people dreamed of building a more competitive, globalised and innovative economy as a platform for long-term prosperity, for stability and for social cohesion.

For hundreds of thousands of families in this country, their dreams turned into a complete nightmare as boom and bust and a stability was replaced by a policy of recklessness and regulatory failures.

To be sure, design flaws that existed in the euro architecture as a whole contributed to this crisis, both here and in the eurozone, and these flaws are gradually being repaired, but there are still serious challenges up ahead. But the lion's share of the damage, Chairman, was done to the Irish economy was the fault of domestic economic and financial mismanagement.

We have learned the hard way that being part of the euro presents, not just opportunities but huge domestic challenges. The need for more effective regulation of the financial system, for greater budgetary discipline, for more responsible and transparent politics, and for relentless pursuit of cost reductions, innovation and product and labour market flexibility so as to maintain our competitiveness in the absence of any control over our exchange rate. So having failed these challenges in the first 15 years of our euro membership, our economic and political institutions are now being renewed and being reformed so that the euro can once become a source of stability, of prosperity, and, indeed, of hope, for the Irish people. Thank you, Chairman.