Arthur Morgan (Louth, Sinn Fein)

I thank Deputy Rabbitte for permitting me to bring whatever reinforcement elements I still possess to his aid and I thank him and the Labour Party for sharing time with me. I recognise the depth and nature of the problems this Bill seeks to address and my party, like many others, is appalled by and opposed to the activities of debt collection agencies that bully and threaten businesses and their owners and, in many cases, families in debt and the heads of those impoverished households.

Like many other Deputies, I have read and watched recent news reports on the issue and I acknowledge the concern these reports create. It is also important to recognise that there is a pressing need to act on the problem of unregulated debt collection. However worthy the Bill presented is, its genesis and structure highlight and perpetuate the very flaws that the proposed legislation seeks to address, including the question of regulation generally.

In recent years, the Government and, to some extent, the larger Opposition parties have taken a Jekyll and Hyde approach to the question of regulation. Without much analysis or consideration, areas were deemed to have too much regulation and we, like many other States, mimicked the Thatcher mantra and deregulated our financial markets, the Stock Exchange and our banking sector. Not content with that, we opened up a second front of deregulation by selling off State-run enterprises and letting a self-regulating private sector provide vital goods and services.

In both cases, the Irish experience has been a massive failure. The lack of effective regulation and controls has given us the basket cases of Eircom and the entire Irish banking sector. A chief driver in this failure of deregulation was the creation of ineffective and toothless regulators. The best example of this was the twin roles played by the Central Bank and the Irish Financial Services Regulatory Authority in recent months. This was a Mr. Hyde angle.

In the past decade, we started a small industry of regulation creation, many of which were needed desperately but very few of which operated effectively or efficiently. The endemic failures of these supposed regulators are why we are where we are. Proposing a Bill that builds on failure does not make sense to me. However, what does make sense is to tackle the wider issue of financial regulation, an important pillar of which is controlling debt collection. Just as important and just as overlooked is the need to ban household moneylending altogether. We must begin again on the question of financial regulation in Ireland; it is an imperative.

Why do we not save the time we could spend on this Bill and immediately direct the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Finance and the Public Service to investigate international best practice and financial regulation? We could take a leaf from the book of one of the few positive consensus-driven exercises ever undertaken in this House, which was the DIRT inquiry. That was the first ignored warning bell that something was very rotten in our banking institutions. The work of the committee would be to find out what went wrong with financial regulation in Ireland and, perhaps more importantly, how to begin again with systems that work. It should be given powers of investigation similar to the DIRT inquiry with a time limit, perhaps to report by 1 September, with feasible options for future regulatory institutions and draft legislation proposed to a public sitting of both Houses of the Oireachtas not later than Tuesday, 8 September. We could implement the Bill alongside it.

However, to support the Bill without addressing the wider issues of an absence of accountable financial regulation in the State would be a mistake. We would merely create another Government agency, albeit well-meaning, without enough public oversight and accountability and with powers that might be better off exercised elsewhere. It might never be more than another quango with an expensive logo, a long name and little real effectiveness. That is not what anyone wants.

The financial crisis has exposed how we do government in Ireland and many of the serious shortcomings associated with it. Governments need to govern and not hide their failures behind the battery of regulators forced to take responsibility for legislative gaps. We need to stop plugging every hole in the dyke with a regulator. The ongoing problems in the taxi sector highlights the needless merry-go-round experienced by an industry caught between a Minister and a regulator.

We need to take stock of all the regulatory agencies we have created in the post-Thatcher, post-monetarist world and ask ourselves in whose interest they were created. In the financial sector it was clear that it was the banks and their executives that were in the driving seat. In many other cases, it was a lazy Government that did not govern but instead farmed out the difficult work and then complained when it was done badly.

Could not the core tenets of the Bill be dealt with by ministerial order? To work in debt collection, one would have to have a licence from the Department of Finance, not have a criminal record and have to have a tax clearance certificate. Perhaps this work could be done by a practising solicitor. Is this not a more suitable and efficient route to do our business?

I am a little concerned that the Bill is reflective. There has been considerable media comment on the issue and rightly so but we have a long "to do" list and the Bill's purpose might not be at the top of it. Unscrupulous and illegal moneylending is just as big a problem as unscrupulous debt collection and often involves the same people. However, because it is not on the RTE news or in the news media spotlight, we regularly overlook it. We must legislate by priority and not by headline.

I would like to discuss, on a separate but perhaps related note, a recently published-----

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