Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

The toxic triangle of Fianna Fáil, bankers and developer-borrowers must be dealt with. I will send the relevant sections of the Bill to the Minister. I acknowledge that he wrote to me yesterday to indicate his intention to amend certain sections at the request of the Labour Party arising from legal advice we received on current crisis conditions. I will send him the further legal advice to which I referred. An undertaking by the Minister to amend the legislation in this respect would be in the public interest.

Like one of the characters in Alice in Wonderland, this legislation requires the public to believe six impossible things before breakfast, all of which come down to a question of trust. Do we trust Fianna Fáil and the Minister for Finance to head up the largest property firm on the planet? Do we trust Fianna Fáil not to bail out the bankers and developer-borrowers? Do we trust the Minister who claimed that the blanket guarantee he introduced for the financial institutions last September would be the cheapest bank rescue in the world? Do we trust a Taoiseach who pleaded that Ireland's economic fundamentals were sound when it was plain to see we were teetering on the brink of disaster? Do we trust a Government that inflated a property bubble, ignored all advice to curtail property-based tax incentives and buried its head in the sand when the house of cards collapsed? Do we trust the Green Party to put the country first or will it stay in office at all costs?

The people are giving their verdict on these questions. We are receiving mountains of e-mails and letters pleading with the Government to change course, because these correspondents know we are heading for disaster. Fianna Fáil's rock-bottom standing in the polls is an indication of the public perception that its trust has been betrayed. People see the modest prosperity they have built up through hard work in the last 15 to 20 years slipping away from them. This is the painful reality for many. People are angry and cannot fathom why the Minister for Finance wants to pour €44 billion into the very financial institutions that hold their mortgages, many of which are now in negative equity. People no longer trust Fianna Fáil on the economy.

During the summer I submitted a freedom of information request in respect of site acquisitions for schools in my constituency, which is also the Minister's. In the last ten years, there has been one gigantic battle after another when 200, 500, 700 or 2,000 houses were built in various developments in Dublin West. Substantial amounts of land were rezoned and it was only after this rezoning that school sites were acquired from the relevant developers. I asked the Minister for Finance and his predecessors and the various Ministers for Education and Science in the last seven years to disclose what Fianna Fáil was paying to developers for school sites. This summer, through a freedom of information request, I finally obtained the information I required. It simply confirmed what I already knew, namely, that the Fianna Fáil way was to pay maxi prices for mini sites. Many children in my constituency are now going to school in modern, recently built schools, but the playgrounds attached to many of these schools are merely small strips of land on either side of the main buildings.

The developers involved, having bought the land at agricultural prices, then sold the rezoned land back to the Government for an average of at least €1 million per acre. One of today's newspapers includes details of my freedom of information request. This shows that one particular developer, Manor Park Homes - sometimes referred to as King of the Castle, for reasons of which we are all aware - received two tranches of some €5 million for a very small site to house two quite large primary schools. The other developers, Menolly Homes and Park Developments, also received fistfuls and shed loads of money for school sites.

The Taoiseach stated earlier on the Order of Business that nobody on this side of the House said anything about all of this. In the last Dáil, the leader of the Labour Party brought forward a proposal to take this type of profiteering by developers at the public's expense out of the trade in building land. The Taoiseach was incorrect when he held up his hands today and said that nobody on the Opposition benches did anything to address these issues. My party did so and I am sure the Fine Gael Party can point to many measures it offered. It is great fun for the Minister to slag off the Opposition as it gets a laugh from his back benches. However, in the case of other countries which worked their way out of similar problems-----

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