Dan Boyle (Cork South Central, Green Party)

I take issue with the Minister for Finance, who seems to accept that it is in order for the State to involve itself, through changes in the tax code, in sweetening deals in the commercial sector between private entities. To what extent was the public interest served by these changes? It seems the only beneficiaries, apart from the individual shareholders, was the Valentia consortium which subsequently had the benefit of selling on a huge asset having been subsidised through two sales of Eircom. The treatment of shareholders within the ESOT must be contrasted with the 550,000 ordinary Eircom shareholders who were forced to sell their shares at a much-reduced price because of the mechanism the Minister introduced allowing the second sale to the Valentia consortium to proceed.

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