Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

This is a truly appalling vista. A 15% haircut is a joke and so are all the dodgy notions about fair value and intrinsic value that we hear about from the vested interests who want to get the State to pay over the odds for their reckless purchases of development lands. Some of the fields outside towns around the country are again being considered as agricultural land because they are no longer worth more than their agricultural value. Perhaps they are worth 10% of their value on the banks' balance sheets.

Consider Ballsbridge in Dublin 4, the prime centre of inflated land prices during the boom. Last week the national newspapers carried advertisements for two buildings on sale in the AIB Bank Centre. They were discounted by a minimum of 44%. I refer to the best property area in Ireland, which has a bank as a tenant. Many less favourable sites are now worth less than 20% of their earlier sale prices. If NAMA entertains any idea of buying such properties at a discount of a mere 15% to 20%, it will cause taxpayer outrage and rightly so.

The main financial institutions must become credibly solvent. That is why the Labour Party is emphasising the nationalisation process and, ultimately, the return of the banks to solvency. The party's view is that the only realistic way to get to grips with this is to nationalise the banks. That still involves a State takeover of the toxic debts and the property assets so that a specialist agency with a professional approach to the liquidation of toxic debts could ultimately manage or sell these assets. However, it avoids any immediate requirement to place a value on them because the transfer would simply be from one State agency to another. Furthermore, no legal problem would arise in this regard.

The act of nationalisation does not in itself dispose of the issue of how to handle the losses, nor does it diminish the scale of capital that the State will have to find to restore the nationalised institutions to a state of commercial health that will allow them to be sold off as the means of recovering the cost that the taxpayer will have to meet for years. Mr. Alan Aherne correctly described that as the upside for taxpayers and businesses in the economy. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the primary motivation of the current NAMA proposal is to avoid the nationalisation route at all costs. That is flawed logic based on political calculations and an excessive wish to return to business as usual in as short a time as possible.

That great observer of Irish politics, John Healy, who is alas no longer with us, made a famous comment about the economic failures of his day. He said, "Nobody shouted stop". It is time to shout "Stop". The time is now, the place is here and I ask the House to vote for this motion. The nationalisation proposal is a response to the failure of Irish capitalism and, as the Minister said, the concomitant failure of global capitalism, globalisation and deregulation. That there is no alternative demonstrates the failure of TINA, the Washington consensus, Mrs. Thatcher and Mr. Reagan, and the failure of Fianna Fáil economics and "Cowenomics". As Deputy Seán Ardagh stated today, "Cowenomics" is very close to Fianna Fáil "Enronomics". This is what we want to say goodbye to. We wish we could say goodbye to all the Members on the other side of the House also but the voters will have their chance on 5 June. Please vote for this motion.

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