Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

I wish to share time with Deputies Rabbitte and Morgan.

The speech we just heard from the Minister for Finance was, to use an American term, a vanilla ice-cream speech. It was a vanilla ice-cream speech on banking in which everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. To add to the sense we have from this Government of panic, dread and confusion, we also have a very valiant attempt by the last three speakers to rewrite history. How can we have confidence in a Government which brought forward a guarantee at the end of September and the beginning of October at the core of which was the protection of Anglo Irish Bank and which failed, as it confessed, to carry out any due diligence or examination of the bank?

It was just a guarantee thrown out there and now we are running away from it. On that and subsequent nights, I recall Fianna Fáil people saying that Ireland being a first mover on the guarantee was a wonder and a clever move. We were the smartest kids on the block. Tonight, the Minister said: "I am firmly of the belief that there is no huge benefit to being first out of the traps with a solution on this issue." The guarantee at the end of September calls to mind Georgia's invasion of Russia, with the same disastrous consequences for the Irish economy that the invasion had for the Georgians. The kind of backtracking we have heard from the Fianna Fáil speakers here would be laughable if it were not so serious for the tens of thousands of people losing their jobs, the businesses that cannot get credit and those who remain in work in the public or private sector but must pay extra charges, levies and taxes to rescue us form the appalling mess Fianna Fáil has made of our economy and the achievements from which so many of us took pleasure.

Regarding the toxic ten — the golden circle of the ten people whose names we are not permitted to know — from the various reports over the weekend we know they had loans of €450 million and were given a 25% personal guarantee on that money. For tax purposes, they will also be able to claim 22% in losses, although we do not know if that is on the entire €451 million or maybe a little less. I estimate they will get at least €80 million in tax losses, which they can carry forward over the next ten or 20 years or whenever the property market recovers. The four people named in The Sunday Times, if their names were correct, are prominent people in the property business, three of them in my constituency and, therefore, well known to members of the Minister's party. It was most interesting to see that.

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