Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

Yesterday we discussed how the Labour Party called for the extension of the deposit guarantee scheme some time before the Government acknowledged there was a serious financial crisis in our banking system last September and before it rushed into the ill-fated guarantee. The Labour Party is on record as proposing a significant increase in the deposit guarantee structure in Ireland.

The Minister did not respond yesterday on the problem in this Bill. This legislation is simply one part of a strategy to address the consequences of the guarantee from last September, which is to split as many of the consequences of the scheme into separate pieces of legislation and bring them separately before the House so we do not have a comprehensive picture of what the Minister and his officials are proposing.

For example, either next week or the week after there will be another miscellaneous financial provisions Bill before this House which will include an extraordinary proposal to give the Minister, among other powers, a right to extend the guarantee after September 2010 indefinitely - for as long or short a period as he so wishes - by way of a ministerial order. As people in this House know, this means, in effect, the Minister will have that power to himself.

I presume that Bill will come in next week. Like today's Bill, Second Stage will be taken on one day and Committee and Remaining Stages will be taken on the next day. We will not get any of the financial details we require to make a judgment as a responsible Opposition and Members of the Dáil.

The Taoiseach and the Minister for Finance, Deputies Cowen and Brian Lenihan, claimed last September that this was a milestone in international banking because of the cleverness of the guarantee. It has gone from being a milestone to being a millstone around the neck of every man, woman and child in this country for this generation and possibly the next.

This finance Bill contains no figures other than the amount of the guarantee. This comes from the same people in the Department of Finance who told us the fundamentals were fine and who fell over each other before the finance committee to say so on various days. There was a chorus of cheerleaders in the Central Bank, the Financial Regulator and the financial institutions but it was led by the Department of Finance, which indicated that the fundamentals were fine and we were well prepared to weather the storm.

We are now getting the first in a series of different pieces of legislation to, in effect, create the NAMA structure in perpetuity so that not only will this Government have a policy but in the event of a change of Government, a subsequent Government will have its hands tied because much of the policy will have been undertaken by then. There will have been very little detailed financial information except for what is gleaned in a piecemeal fashion.

This amounts to an act of bad faith by the Department of Finance and the Minister with respect to Dáil Éireann because we are not getting the required information. We have not been told of the level of deposits. I told the Minister I asked questions about this early last year and I have the replies of the then Minister for Finance regarding deposit levels in credit unions and banks in the jurisdiction.

It is wrong of the Minister to come here without a financial brief telling us the level of deposits covered through this Bill in covered and other institutions. What is the composition of those deposits? This legislation as it relates to deposit insurance essentially arises from European regulation and legislation and we have no proper definition in the Irish context of what it means. For example, can a group of bond holders move deposits from a category of bond or secured instrument into and out of deposits?

Yesterday I raised with the Minister the specific issue of the former managing director and chairman of Anglo Irish Bank, who we know owes significant millions to the bank in property loans. It was reliably reported in newspapers a few weeks ago and not denied that this gentleman also had deposits amounting to a number of millions in Anglo Irish Bank, and there was no recourse to these deposits in regard to the lending undertaken by this man from Anglo Irish Bank. We were told by Mr. O'Connor before an Oireachtas committee and in the recent report of Anglo Irish Bank that directors' loans amounting to €31 million were being categorised and essentially written off as bad debts. That is where we are today.

Directors' deposits are subject to the guarantee in so far as they are deposits below the €100,000 mark. The taxpayer, who now owns Anglo Irish Bank and is writing off tens of millions of euro in bad debts - some in respect of the same director - has no recourse between the debts and the deposits. I asked the Minister about this yesterday and it is wrong of him not to explain it. For the ordinary people on the street, a deeply unfair aspect of this is that they see their taxes going up and their take-home pay going down while at the same time, the directors who ran this bank off the cliff and on to the rocks have special arrangements. The Minister is not prepared to tell us what the arrangements are.

If the public is bailing out this bank to the tune of €60 billion-----

See this speech in context