Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)

I propose to share the 30 minutes allocated with Deputies Jan O'Sullivan, Joe Costello, Joanna Tuffy and Kathleen Lynch. The Labour Party motion is not about ideology but methodology. The Labour Party does not wish to own the banks, we wish to fix them. The banks cannot fix themselves, as we have seen in the past nine months. We saw what took place today at the Allied Irish Bank annual general meeting. Bankers have been in constant denial. Anyone who knows banks, and there is one such Deputy in the House, realises that the people who have caused the problems cannot fix them any more than the rest of us could do so in such circumstances.

Initially, the concept of NAMA had some attractions. I supported it because we must get the toxic debt out of the way and return to normal banking operations. However, upon examination of the small detail, it seems the difficulty is that NAMA is supposed to take the book value of toxic debt, which is of the order of €90 billion, off the books of the banks such that the credit of the banks can be restored in the international markets, which is critical. What discount will NAMA give on the real value of the assets and how does one measure the real value? All the property expertise is in the banks. Developers, with whom I have worked in the past, are not ordinary domestic borrowers with a mortgage, a car loan, an extension loan and so on. They are involved in highly leveraged, sophisticated, back-to-back arrangements with interest deals rolled up and piled up which are utterly different from the loans people usually arrange. The expertise to deal with these arrangements is not in the National Treasury Management Agency. The Minister who spoke on behalf of the Green Party referred to the NTMA's experience in managing debt. It has no experience in managing this type of debt. That is a misnomer and it is misleading.

We know that if one were to transfer the debts and loans of a given developer, irrespective of who that developer is, from a bank to a new agency and if that agency informed the developer what is owed to it, the matter would go to the courts. In some cases the money owed by the developer may have been sourced in three or four different banks. We know from the tribunal involving Mr. Goodman and others that there will be five years of litigation in the courts because most developers will simply ask their legal advisers to buy time.

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