Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

No. I will move on but let me make this point. The Minister is being completely misleading because he has no record to defend himself, and that is his problem. I am not talking about a broad tax on insurance companies. I am saying that the portion of profit they have deducted due to the pandemic payments should be recovered by the State and, on that, the Minister should be meeting them, he should be asking them and he should be talking to them face to face. If they do not hand it over, then the other option is to do it in the exact same way we did with the bankers' bonuses, which is just on that unique amount. That is what I am saying.

By the way, the Minister had no problem retrospectively taxing every Tom, Dick and Harry who lost their job during the pandemic and was in receipt of the €350 pandemic unemployment payment but, by God, he has got plenty of legal advice to hide behind when it comes to insurance companies pocketing tens of millions of euro of the same pandemic payments.

We are pressed for time. I would not be selling AIB. The last time AIB paid dividends, in 2019, it was €329 million and it was €232 million before that. There is a value in keeping the shareholding in AIB and there is still a value in the shareholding itself. Why now? Why did the Minister take the decision now compared with 2017, for example, when the share price was twice as high as it is now, or 2018, when it was 70% higher?