Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)

That is all very well but the Minister can say: "We have now made these commitments and simply cannot go back on them." We have no time to debate it now but when the Minister comes forward with the scheme he will tell us: "This is ready to go - AIB or Bank of Ireland have made huge commitments, they are ready to sign and the House must get this through."

We have already seen this happen. We were told with the guarantee that there was a buffer for the taxpayer. However, very quickly after that we heard that AIB and even Anglo Irish Bank were to get €1.5 billion in recapitalisation. We had no role in deciding whether that was a good thing. Then we were told Anglo Irish Bank would be nationalised. That debate was curtailed and we did not get a chance to insert protections. Following that, we were told that Anglo Irish Bank had to be kept going as a going concern. It could not be nationalised on the basis of a wind down. We did not get the opportunity to have a proper debate on whether these were sound policies. That is frustrating.

With each sequence the Minister states that he is only looking for one thing, but he will already have made commitments. In the case of NAMA, for example, he will probably have made commitments before September that are simply irreversible. Technically, the Minister can say the Dáil is approving the matter but de facto he will have entered into such commitments and the train will be so far down the track that going back to the station to redesign the train will not be an option. The Minister will not accept amendments because the train will have long since left the station as far as he is concerned.

There is a legitimate role for this House but it is not getting a chance to exercise it. This is a type of smother tactic. If one questions it later on then one is guilty of sabotage. It is like the Government asking us to admire its work even as it wishes to re-design some element of it. We are told this is outrageous and are asked to imagine what will happen to our international standing, with people looking in at us who will think we are a banana republic. We are told the Oireachtas wants to having a say in designing how our very great amounts of money will be committed. I am very unhappy with the way this is going.

I can see the argument for a selective extension of the guarantee and I do not oppose that. However, I do not see anything about selectivity before us and cannot understand why we do not extend the powers under section 5. We are asking the taxpayer to extend our guarantee and take all this on the shoulders but the protections outlined in section 5, in which the Minister has powers to take action with the banks, will die in September 2010. Surely there is a quid pro quo. If the taxpayer is to be asked to carry the guarantee beyond the September date, surely we should be told there will be powers to match the responsibility we are being asked to take on board. However, there is no mention of extending section 5 and the admittedly extraordinary powers afforded to the Minister by that section. I believe we should extend a de-limited number of those powers beyond September 2010 in order to have a balance.

I welcome the Minister's talk of changes in the regulatory system. I will not dwell on this because we are constrained by time. However, nobody believes that the reason our property bubble got out of hand was because the Central Bank and the Irish Financial Services Regulatory Authority, IFSRA, were not talking to one another. That is the plainest poppycock I have ever heard. There was no problem with the Central Bank being able to talk to the IFSRA, or with both knowing what the other was doing. They had substantially the same, or interlocking, board members. The Governor of the Central Bank had the chance to say anything he liked and the opportunity under law to request any information he wanted from the IFSRA. He had absolute authority to get everything that was needed.

There is a notion that we need to re-design all these stables to the highest international standard but what really happened was that the stable door was left gaping open when the horse galloped out. This was not a defect in the design of the stable though now we may say there were some defects in the design. The bodies were adequately supported and the design defects were consciously and knowingly pushed through this House by the Minister's predecessor but one. It was not the design that went wrong. The theoretical criticism of that design was about merging consumer protection with prudential. The Central Bank, which had responsibility for systemic risk, had all the powers it needed to protect against systemic risk if it had been on the ball and doing its work. The truth was the horse bolted because that stable door was lying open and all we heard were a few powerless whimpers as the horse galloped out the door. That is the reality. To say that this is about best practice and is driven by the EU standards is misleading concerning what happened. We should, as other jurisdictions have, a White Paper on regulation prior to the implementation of the change but to cover people's blushes, we are pushing ahead with the re-carving up of the institutions. However, that was not the problem. This is covering other people's blushes - not, in this case, those of the Minister - and it is not a very satisfactory way to do it. We should take it more seriously.

The same can be said of the NAMA. I do not believe we have had anything like the level we should have of evaluation available to the House and to the general public in respect of a decision of such grave national importance.

I shall turn briefly to the issue of pension provisions. As Deputy Burton mentioned on the Order of Business, we are taking on our shoulders over €3.1 billion in liability versus assets of €1.75 billion. That is a substantial deficit to be taken on the shoulders of the taxpayer. Undoubtedly, the Minister will say there was an implicit commitment in this area and that, implicitly, the State was going to support the pensions of universities, and so on. We must examine the merchandise before we make a purchase of this nature. It is the most basic rule. One does one's due diligence before one takes on such liability. It is now absolutely on our shoulders. Where is the actuaries' audit of these pension funds? Deputy Ardagh, who would be far more qualified in this respect than I, will understand that one would expect some sort of report concerning what are the assets and the liabilities. What did the actuaries say to the trustees about what should be done to contain the deficit? Are the practices in these pension funds sound? Are there some crazy practices going on? We ought to have that sort of information before us before walking in to shoulder all these commitments.

I accept we must shoulder many of them but we should be vetting what are the practices and whether they are well-based. Are practices going on here that would not happen in other areas of the public service and in other areas of pension policy, practices we would not want to have carried into the public sector? We must look at that and have some reassurance.

See this speech in context