Fergus O'Dowd (Louth, Fine Gael)

People want the old order to change. Under this Government nothing has really changed. Yesterday we saw the evidence of the brass-necked Fianna Fáil Minister for Finance who had not read a critical report on our financial health and what was going on in our banks. He failed miserably in that test. We see no sign of Fianna Fáil's brass band, the Green Party, whose members were here earlier, mute and silent. Probably none of them will appear before the evening. Let us have facts. Things are rotten in the Irish banking system. The Government has failed to act until now. We are expected to accept, the morning after, the incredible circumstances in which one banking institution deposited money in another bank as a customer rather than as an inter-bank loan. Around the world our Government is being ridiculed because it failed to act.

We need a change in the regulations and in the law. We need to protect whistleblowers in the banking system — people such as Eugene McErlean, the internal auditor who told AIB in 2001 that there was serious overcharging of their customers, to the tune, it turned out, of €65 million. He was a decent and honourable man. He went to the Central Bank and later to the Financial Regulator, and spent four years bringing this issue to the attention of the authorities. This man was not protected in his place of employment. He is not protected today. He is not free to say what he wants to about what went on in AIB. We are now bailing out a rotten system while failing to protect the whistleblowers in that system who will tell us, factually and truthfully, what is going on. They put everything they have on the line to make sure there is probity and integrity within our banking system.

Everybody wants this recapitalisation to work. Small businesses and small employers need the money. Let us hope it does work. The Government should listen to what Deputy Bruton is saying. We need a bad bank so we can put the bad debts into one location and let the good banks lend to the good people out there. However, we need to police the system and protect those people within the system who want to tell us the truth by making known facts they cannot legally make known.

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