Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

The Minister must stop short selling the country. Perhaps this should be done by way of a committee.

We saw the spectacle yesterday, and the day before, of chief executives of banks going to the House of Commons and the US Congress and 'fessing up. They told their parliaments they were sorry. They did not quite use Obama's term, "I screwed up", but they did go in and face the people's representatives and apologise. The people whom the Minister is bailing out here are using the Seánie FitzPatrick line, "thanks a million", but are not saying sorry.

I do not know where the absolute anger of some people in this democracy will take them. The Minister must understand, as a democrat, that these executives must come in here and respond to the elected representatives and explain themselves. That is an important cathartic point that the Government, partly because it is still in denial, has missed.

I do not know on what planet the Taoiseach is living. According to the business pages of The Irish Times yesterday at the Institute of Engineers "Mr. Cowen took issue with 'commentators in the public debate'" — I suppose that is us and all the media and journalists — "who blamed the current crisis entirely on an over-reliance on revenues from the construction industry. He described that analysis as 'futile and facile'." Bank of Ireland has stated that the 45% increase in impairments in the year to date are down to the construction industry. The Taoiseach's statement denies reality.

The Government's recapitalisation is effectively nationalisation without national control. The Minister is putting €3.5 billion of tier one capital into each of the banks, but he is doing it by means of preferred stock. He then has a "get out of jail" clause for the taxpayer by stating that some of this may be converted into a 25% ordinary share stake at a later date. There would be downsides to nationalising the banks, but the cost and the return to the taxpayer would be potentially far more significant.

I would also like to disagree with a fatuous statement that the Minister continuously makes on radio and television. He continuously states that this costs us nothing, and that not a penny of taxpayers' money has gone into bank recapitalisation, or the guarantee in September. Who does he think he is codding? I hope he does not believe this himself and that this is not about failing to read the report. Part of me still hopes that maybe he did read the report, but that there might be other stuff that he does not want to know, because there is more bad stuff waiting in the wings. In his reply to me last week, the Minister stated that there has been an increase of €544 million in the cost of servicing the national debt. As the Minister knows, most of that is due to the increase in the number of basis points for Ireland when compared to the German rate or even the European average. To suggest that what the Government has done so far is free of cost is not true. The actual cost, per the Minister's own answer last Thursday, is €544 million. In addition, the National Treasury Management Agency has advised me that the expected cost of financing the national debt in 2009 is €4.5 billion, which represents an increase of €2.401 billion. I ask the Minister please to stop telling us that these events are cost free to the Irish taxpayer. Irish taxpayers, and possibly the grandchildren of the these taxpayers, will have to repay this.

He should not suggest to the people, who are getting increasingly incensed, that he has some magic formula. As the leader of the Labour Party pointed out yesterday, the Government's approach to this is like being at a racecourse with a three card trick. We are being asked to believe several mutually impossible and inconsistent things. We need to get to the level of debate where we can actually analyse the different options.

Deputy Rabbitte suggested the other day that an expert committee of the House could examine some of these issues as they do in other parliaments. Many people like the bipartisan approach that operates from time to time in the States. People would have seen the House of Commons select committee at work yesterday. One of the bankers at that committee stated that instead of being a master of the universe, he felt that he was not even a corporal. Where does that leave our bankers? Where does that leave the eight point programme policy that the Labour Party gave to the Minister? I thank the Minister for taking the time to read it, because he discussed it with me and Deputy Gilmore at great length yesterday.

We must get credit flowing to business. The 10% increase in lending to businesses that has been provided in the Minister's document for small and medium enterprises is welcome. However, he will have to ride herd on it to make it happen. He will have to work hard and think up imaginative ways for that to happen. The Minister also spoke about a 30% increase in loans to first-time purchasers, but given the current state of the market, I am not quite sure what measures he has in mind to make that happen. If we had a question and answer session, he could explain this to us. This is potentially important in order to get the market moving, but we need to know the details of how the Minister proposes to do it. We also heard about the €100 million for green projects in the guarantee programme last autumn, but I do not know to what extent that has been followed through.

The Labour Party discussed with the Minister how it might be possible to identify the scale of bad assets and write down impaired assets. He has been silent on this. From the media, I understand that he is now thinking of some kind of insurance system. The problem with an insurance system is that old bad debts are being insured, when the insurance system should go into new lending. We want to get credit flowing to existing businesses who may be having difficulty accessing lending. The Minister's insurance scheme being mentioned in the media——

See this speech in context