Michael D Higgins (Galway West, Labour)

What would the inspector do? The inspector would draw the poison of a system that has damaged this country and create the clean conditions in which we could have an accountable culture of banking.

It is not mysterious. There was one time people understood finance clearly. It is knowable, there is no mystery about it. The mystery came about when right-wing thinking suggested everybody could be a shareholder and that their greed was financed by dividends, which were governed by performance in products that were running out in number. Therefore, bonuses came from inventing fictions of risk and investment. That is what happened internationally and few people have the courage to say it. Bank people who had been banking and investing went on, not just speculating but gambling into the future, gambling on unsustainable levels of risk.

That is why no one can answer the question I am asking. Regarding the bank the public will now own, what is the status on the day-to-day advances made to that bank by those who have lent to it? The Minister said it would be just like it was before but that is not much of an assurance because the inspector would have told us what it was like before.

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