Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour)

I know that but the reason we are dealing with the Bill before the House is because of the measure the Minister took on 29 September. The alternative facing the taxpayers now is that the bank faced insolvency, the guarantee would be invoked and that, as a result, Irish taxpayers would have to come up with somewhere between €30 billion to €40 billion. In that circumstance, this is the reason the Bill to nationalise the bank is before the House. The Minister has asked the House to trust him and to trust him also when he changes his mind. During the recapitalisation debate in December, I asked the Minister whether he intended to nationalise Anglo Irish Bank that weekend and what were the implications of such a decision for the two big banks. The Minister did not answer that question but when the question was put to him outside the House, he stated: "Were we to go from the last step before nationalisation to nationalisation itself, the taxpayer will be taking an awful risk with no return." The Minister has now taken that step and in his honeyed way he has conveyed that the €1.5 billion which was intended to be used to recapitalise Anglo Irish Bank is now being saved and that we are very fortunate. The Minister did not tell the House yet what is the cost. He has the PwC report. What is the likely cost of the step he is now taking? What is the likely cost to taxpayers of the nationalisation situation? These are reasonable and fair questions for us to ask and we have not been given answers yet. Why are we not being given even an expurgated version of the PwC report?

With regard to auditors, there has not been a scandal in this country since Goodman in which auditors have not been pivotally involved. I sat across the table for seven weeks in the DIRT inquiry from the big five auditing companies and each one of them allowed what happened in the DIRT scandal to happen. They have signed off on the Goodman affair and others and, unfortunately, the House did not take action it ought to have taken in terms of the conduct of accountants and auditors.

The Minister seems to be saying that the Labour Party was somehow less than measured in raising these critical questions. We have been very careful and the only remark I recall that did damage — I greatly regret it — to our reputation and our international standing, was the unfortunate remark made last week, not by the Labour Party and for which the Taoiseach carries no blame. The Taoiseach had nothing to do with it. The remark was regrettably made in another context and it has been damaging but other than that, the questions that we are raising need to be raised. If there is to be any real accountability, we need to know the answers to these questions. The Minister is now asking us again because he has changed his mind. He has gone now from recapitalisation to nationalisation and some of what we need to know about the operation of this bank we do not know. This is not a typical bank. The Minister had the option on 29 September not to include this bank and this is the significance and relevance of me raising that issue in this debate this evening. I greatly regret that we do not have adequate time to discuss this Bill in the way that it deserves.

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