Ciarán Lynch (Cork South Central, Labour)

Tomorrow morning every man, woman and child in this country will wake up owning this bank as a result of the decision we are making today. Every child born tomorrow may also be inheriting the liabilities and costs of this decision. How we have come to own this bank may never be known, because of the way business is being conducted in the House today. Like many people watching this debate, I do not know too much about subordinate lending or about banking governance or the discourse of banking. However, I know about buying things. If Anglo Irish Bank were a car, I would want to see the log book, I would want to look at the mileage and I certainly would want to look under the bonnet. If we were to look at Anglo Irish Bank in this context, we would see that there was fraudulent reporting in the log book, that the mileage had been tampered with and that the only servicing the engine ever received was for the directors and a very select few in this society.

The State is buying a banger at a forecourt price and will be paying repayments for quite a number of years. When the House last debated the banking situation we were looking at notional costs and notional liabilities. We are now moving into the realm of real costs and real liabilities. We are into deep liabilities and deep costs. The bank which the State is bailing out through a process of nationalisation is not the type of bank with which I am familiar.

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