Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)

We need radical and total change. I accept the Government now has the opportunity to bring in a fresh board. Members of the Oireachtas deserve an opportunity to vet the suitability, appropriateness and policies that are going to be pursued. We need to see the strategy that is to be pursued if this bank, as the Minister says, is to be made a going concern. He knows we are sceptical that the bank can be made a going concern. I fear that if we talk about it being made so, and continuing ad infinitum, it may be only on the basis of a drip feed from the taxpayer that does not protect the taxpayers' interest to the maximum possible extent.

The Minister has not articulated his strategy for Anglo Irish. He has kicked it off into the middle distance so that someone will come back and tell him what the strategy will be. That does not give us assurance, which is a concern. We need to see that nailed down in the course of this debate.

As many people have said, we believe that transparency and accountability must be in this vehicle. We do not see transparency, for example, concerning the loan book. The Minister told Deputy Kenny, in an aside, that he could not possibly give the PwC report because it contains confidential commercial information. The Minister should purge the confidential information in it and put the report in the public domain. We, the taxpayers, now own this bank and we must have transparency concerning the state of the loan book. We will have to manage that over the coming years and must be assured that it is managed in an aggressive way to protect the taxpayer. We need to have that information flow coming to us regularly, about the current status of the loan book, how much of it is distressed, non-performing or in a category where there is a belief that the value can be recovered. We need to have that sort of information and there should be a transparency section in this Bill to deal with that and many other issues.

What is the future of the going concern? If the Minister believes that a bank that has been predominantly funding on a model that most people say is broken — namely, access to the short-term money markets — and if he believes that it can now transform itself from being predominantly a property development bank into a new bank for the future, we deserve to see what his credible strategy for that is, if that is the direction in which he is going. Otherwise, we are into managing a wind-down and working out of the strategy, not liquidation. The contrast in my view is not between liquidation and nationalisation, as the Minister has suggested.

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