Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)

I am often disappointed at the tone of debate in this House. I recall speaking as an Opposition Deputy during debates on budgets past. On those occasions, a genuine effort was always made to engage and analyse constructively and to offer positive feedback and praise where such were due. We also tried to propose alternative solutions. Therefore, I am very disappointed at the tone of the remarks by Deputy Connaughton.

The proposal put forward by the Government is worthy of detailed examination. We are all agreed that there is a major problem in the banking sector. One of the issues that surprises me somewhat is that the money lent by our banks was, in its turn, loaned to those banks by large financial institutions outside the State. A question that tends to be ignored in the debate is how these institutions managed to get their risk evaluations so wrong. One would have assumed they had top-ranking experts monitoring the Irish market into which they were lending billions of euro. One would assume these institutions would do everything possible to make sure their money was safe. That is one of the great mysteries of the situation in which we find ourselves. That particular mystery is not confined to this island. It seems that top bankers lending money on the inter-bank market made tremendously bad calls in recent years, despite all the available modern technology, the required risk analysis processes and so on.

However it came about, we have a major problem, namely, underperforming loans and assets that are no longer valued at the amount accorded to them as security. I ask the Opposition to study fully the exact nature of our proposal. I will welcome criticism from Opposition Members when I am confident they understand what we are trying to do. Something I find disconcerting, and something which did not happen when I was last in opposition, is that it seems to be commonplace now that rather than Opposition Deputies using their own intelligence to review critically proposals by the Government-----

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