Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

Section 5 is truly extraordinary. It gives the Minister enormous powers, with only very limited reference to the Dáil. It provides that the Minister may, in respect of any difficulty that arises in the operation of the Bill during the two-year period, make regulations to do anything that appears necessary or expedient in bringing the Bill into operation. I assume this would apply in the event that something went seriously wrong with the guarantee scheme or with one of the parties covered by the guarantee scheme. The various court cases to which Deputy Shatter referred indicate that the courts might take a dim view of the types of powers the Minister proposes to assign to himself under this legislation.

We have spoken about the end of the era of absolute deregulation in the banking system and of the activities of freebooting international institutions. However, in the changed circumstances in which we find ourselves, it is not the Minister's job simply to protect the free market depredations of banks which may have acted wrongly and recklessly and, in the process, to close out the Dáil from debating their behaviour. However, that is what he seeks to do in assigning these powers to himself.

My amendments Nos. 6 and 7 propose that, rather than referring to another Minister should he so wish, the Minister for Finance should consult the Dáil for reference purposes. We suggest that the appropriate Oireachtas body for this purpose is the Joint Committee on Finance and the Public Service. There are a large number of Oireachtas committees and this would be an important job for this particular committee. The Minister's appointment is held to the Cabinet and Government. It is the latter which proposes legislation but it is the Oireachtas which enacts it. However, the Minister is seeking in this section to short-circuit the entire process. More importantly, he is seeking effectively to have an operation behind closed doors. That era of banking is over.

See this speech in context