Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)

I wish to ask the Minister a number of questions arising from his reply. He indicated that the PricewaterhouseCoopers report of October contained this information but he did know about it until January. Did he not read the report? Did his Department regard this as so trivial that his officials did not bring it to his attention if he did not read the report himself? Did this transaction, which he noted in his earlier reply was described as a customer deposit even though it clearly was not such a deposit in any normal sense, not ring alarm bells?

When he proposed on 21 December to put €1.5 billion into Anglo Irish Bank, did nobody from the Financial Regulator or his Department inform the Minister that the serious issues which had arisen in the way the bank had been behaving were reason for pausing before investing taxpayers' money as if it were a sound bank with a long-term future? The Minister indicated that reputational damage was the reason he moved from putting in the cash to nationalising the bank but it would now appear that much of the information about the reputational damage was known by his Department and the regulator, without anything being done about it.

Why did the Minister feel that he should not reveal this information to the Dáil when we were debating the nationalisation of Anglo Irish Bank? The House was quite divided on the nature of the legislation and the appropriateness of the protections that were being included. My own party indicated that an orderly wind-down was appropriate for a bank that had been seriously damaged. Why was this not revealed to the Dáil at a time when serious decisions were being made that put taxpayers' money at risk?

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