Pearse Doherty (Donegal South West, Sinn Fein)
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I understand what the Minister is saying in terms of the risk being small but it is risk the Central Bank is not going to take. Indeed, the bank is willing for that risk to be placed on the shoulders of the taxpayers. That is something with which I cannot agree. It goes against the spirit of the thing, even though what we are discussing does not complete the commitment made to break the link between the sovereign and banking. The link is still there. There will be a call on the State after a series of other mechanisms and bail-ins. There is still a potential for a call on the State. A state also has the ability not to make that. This year is an automatic regardless of whether a government or parliament wants to provide the money. Basically, we are writing it into our law that if the Central Bank issues this cheque to a bank that gets into trouble in the future, we will refund the Central Bank within two weeks. That is a blank cheque which takes matters a step too far because we do not know where we will be in a number of years. Touch wood, we will not be in dire straits and hopefully an issue of this nature would not be one of huge concern. Hopefully, the fund will have enough money at a point in time to deal with all eventualities. However, there are risks. The issue is that we are putting this into law today. The officials in the Department of Finance are well aware of the ECB's rules on monetary financing. I do not expect that people are unaware of these rules, given that it is one of the biggest issues we have been discussing in the State around a number of matters including the promissory note. Nevertheless, this Bill, which passed scrutiny by the Attorney General, threw up the issue relating to the phrase "with the approval of the Minister". I presume that somewhere within the Department there was a view that this phrase could be inserted and that there would still be compliance in the context of the ECB's role regarding the prohibition on monetary financing. I am reluctant to approve the deletion of these words.