Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

-----from, presumably, the Department of Finance.

For the Dáil to award these sweeping powers to a Minister is an abdication of responsibility. For Government Deputies to agree so casually to this Bill would be a shocking dereliction of duty. The Dáil has a sacred duty to scrutinise the exercise of power by Ministers. This Bill abandons that duty and enables the Minister to exercise power without due accountability. The Bill should be opposed in principle. The core value that is entirely absent here today is transparency.

We only got the PricewaterhouseCoopers report on Anglo Irish Bank because that bank imploded under the weight of its persistent malpractice and had to be nationalised. We have still not received a full review of Bank of Ireland, AIB or the Irish Nationwide Building Society. How then can this House, in the absence of full information, so readily abandon its duty and transfer so much power to one Minister with no restrictions on the exercise of that power and not demand that he provide the Dáil and the taxpaying public with sufficient evidential basis for the decisions he makes in the exercise of those powers? This Bill will result in liabilities for the taxpayer of tens of billions over a period of time less than five years, depending on whatever date the Minister deems the Paris agreement originated, yet there is not as much as a figure in the Bill. I will refer to the pension liabilities and the pension assets taken over. It is truly stunning to have such a Bill, the financial implications of which will affect not only this generation of taxpayers, but taxpayers for another 20 years.

Believe it or not, Mr. Enron over on the Government side does not even have a financial figure to offer us. That is absolutely outrageous. How can we so casually agree to the Bill without guarantees of accountability? I do not trust the Minister's party on this matter. It has been and remains the silent spider at the centre of a conspiratorial web of dodgy property deals and corrupt rezoning. How could it be trusted? That party is simply too closely wedded to vested interests in the property sector to enjoy the trust of the people in this sensitive matter. Why the extra layer of guarantee at this point? First, we had the 29 September guarantee, time-limited for two years. Then we had NAMA, the mechanism to transfer dodgy loans to the State at excessive prices. Now we have a proposal to abolish the two-year time limit and replace it with ministerial powers to extend the time. In effect, it is a triple layer of State protection for the banks.

If NAMA gets up and running in the coming year - we understand it is to be up and running sometime in September - surely the banks will have their worst performing loans transferred by September 2010? Why would they then need an additional extension of the guarantee? The Minister has told us NAMA will work, that it will take the dodgy loans and clean up the banks' balance sheet, yet the banks' balance sheets having been cleaned up, we are now offering another guarantee for up to five years. We do not even have a date. In fact, in the Schedule, the additional guarantee period is unlimited and undated. This is an extra cocoon of Lenihan insulation from the cold winds of the market for our wretched banks.

I thought capitalism's great virtue was the value it placed on market disciplines. If one invested and took risk, then one was entitled to the rewards of success with modest taxation. If one lost and one's investment failed, then tough luck. Try again. No lame ducks. No sore losers. Why are the banks now exempt from all those rules? They are now lame ducks kept alive solely because of the guarantee and the prospect of NAMA taking on their soured loans. Are they not sore losers? Look at them, still in total denial of the wreckage they have created in businesses, families and people with jobs and employment around the country.

The Minister is a distinguished senior counsel. He knows what double jeopardy means. What we have tonight is double jeopardy in reverse. It is double indemnity for the banks. In fact, it is triple indemnity for them. Indemnity No. 1 is the first guarantee. It has not worked so the banks want another fix. Indemnity No. 2 is NAMA, the magic wand that will draw the poison of bad loans away from the balance sheets. Now the Minister has gone one step further with this new power to extend the guarantee for a further undefined period that I understand is to be up to five years. The banks are to be saved and now they are to be cocooned by three layers of Lenihan insulation.

Does moral hazard have any place in this Minister's universe? Moral hazard arises because an institution does not have to suffer the full consequences and responsibilities of its actions. This weekend at Farmleigh the Minister appears to have thrown the avoidance of moral hazard out the window as a guiding principle of policy in the case of all commercial banks. Their debts, no matter how dodgy and how recklessly accumulated, will now, in effect, be the sovereign debts of the State according to the Lenihan Farmleigh doctrine. According to The Irish Times, the Government press office did not circulate any speech from the event in Farmleigh, whatever it was. Nor it is on the Department's website. I wonder why. Is it because it contains some extremely important statements? What did the Minister, Deputy Brian Lenihan, say at this dinner? One sentence stands out in the report.

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