Eamon Ryan (Dublin South, Green Party)

I shall address the banking issue which formed a fundamental part of the announcements made by the Government today concerning the problem we have. In addition to the public finance figure details I set out, we have a bigger difficulty on the banking side. To offer a rough analysis, in 1990 we had approximately €30 billion in public debt, or Government borrowing, and approximately €20 billion in private borrowing. In 2007, on the public debt side those figures had gone up to €37 billion. If one takes into account our pension reserve and the cash we had in the National Treasury Management Agency we were one of the lowest indebted countries. However, our private debt had grown from €20 billion to more than €400 billion. That is our fundamental exposure and what we must manage to contract within a world where banking and credit will themselves contract because the unsustainable banking model of the past 30 years clearly is no longer viable. Across the world people were borrowing too much, particularly in this country, and the future could not pay back that debt.

That became a stark issue last September when the international model crashed and Lehman Brothers could not meet its interbank commitments. The model of our banks, which was led, it must be said, by a small number of individuals in a small number of institutions, was ultimately a false one. The concept that we could take international money in here on a short-term basis and lend it long term to developers and commercial operators was ultimately not viable. That became apparent when the international money was no longer available to us. That is why we had to respond last September in order to protect the deposit base and to keep our banking system from crashing as it surely would have done, along with the economy.

I listened earlier to Deputy Rabbitte who made his typical comments about the Green Party. He is not, however, in the shoes of a person who must make a decision. It is very easy in Deputy Rabbitte's shoes to be smart and witty, clever and critical. Let him put on the shoes of a person who faces the prospect that this economy might crash and let us see what decision is made. Let us see what the call of the Opposition might be then, rather than the easy one-----

See this speech in context