Michael Noonan (Limerick East, Fine Gael)

They will not be subject to EU law because the Minister is making provision that they be excluded from the provisions under EU law to treat them as mergers and reconstruction, and that they will just be a kind of management issue. He has set it up so that without returning to the House, he may instruct the National Pensions Reserve Fund to take a majority shareholding in AIB and Bank of Ireland right up to taking a controlling interest or 100%. More interestingly he has removed the commercial mandate requirement in the 2000 legislation so that it can invest even if it is not a commercially viable proposition. There is a man who never intends using these provisions and yet he went down to that level of detail. It is contained in the Bill and outlined in the Minister's speech.

People are scared enough without scaring them further. It is absolutely clear to me as to the road we are going down at the moment and it is not a very pleasant road. If I were giving advice to the Minister I would ask him why he is always chasing the issue. Why is he not upfront and admit this is not working? We need to go further and do it now. If the Minister got ahead of the game for once he would create confidence. The public are waiting for confidence. There is considerable talk about lack of leadership. What is leadership anyway? Leadership is taking the decisions that are necessary to be taken in a timely manner. There is no point in taking the decisions that are necessary to be taken when it is too late and we have gone on to the next event.

It is as clear as crystal that as we in the Opposition said the decision about a budget should have been taken a fortnight ago because it was clear that the public finances were going off the rails. We found out today that the €37 billion that the Government had pencilled in as the inflow to the Exchequer will only be €34.5 billion, which puts us another €2.5 billion adrift. The Taoiseach today announced that before the end of the month he would take measures to correct this. Again he is behind the curve and behind the pace. I know he gets offended when he is accused of lack of leadership. However, it was as clear as crystal to all of us in the House and to the commentators since 1 February that it was not possible to carry the budgetary decision beyond the date of the local and European Parliament elections and the Government would be forced to act sooner. However, by not acting sooner it will be subject to considerably more criticism. In terms of inculcating confidence into the economy, a decision forced onto the Government at the end of March gets it no marks whereas a decision voluntarily taken to bring in a budget on the same day as the pension levy would be better politics because it would appear more equitable and would give some confidence to the economy.

I found it a pretty depressing day. I found the Minister's speech pretty depressing. However, to give him his due he cheered me up in one page of his speech in which he tried to deal with the problem of the Green Party in government. It is quite clear that in Cabinet the Green Party Ministers were very concerned about the banks, but they did not express that concern or make it conditional. They were very concerned about lots of things but they did not make it conditional. However, they were seriously concerned as to whether the investment made by the National Pensions Reserve Fund was ethical. The Green Party has been on this bailiwick for a long time. What is ethical on the left is not always ethical on the right. On the question of contraceptive devices as the Minister of State will know, there is an extreme left opinion that they should be given out free with the cocoa and the Coke depending on what one's going to bed tonic is. There is a view on the right that they should be banned because they are the devil's instruments. It is very difficult for an investment company in examining the ethics of investment in a company that produces such devices to decide whether it is ethical.

I actually like the Minister. What he does, as explained in his speech, is to raise an issue which nobody raised in this context. He said that given that we are legislating again for matters relating to the National Pensions Reserve Fund, the issue of ethical investment comes up. In his next paragraph he went on to say that it is a very serious issue because it was debated at the time and it was decided that it would be left to the fund managers to decide on an ethical basis for what they would invest in but that the Government would not mandate them to exclude any investments. He then went on to say that in the experience of the past nine years with sovereign funds, they are taking a different attitude to ethical investment and that we need to take that into account.

However, he claimed that what we are doing today is of such urgency and of such importance to the economy that we could not deal with the matter in today's Bill and he would set up a committee that will report in three months. I am delighted that the Green Party had such a major input into this economic crisis that it got a committee on ethical investment that will report in three months. I ask the Minister in his reply to give a commitment to debate that report in the House. I would love to debate a report from an interdepartmental committee on ethical investment. I would like to have it debated here in the House and I am looking for that commitment from the Minister.

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