Tony Killeen (Clare, Fianna Fail)

Some critics of the National Asset Management Agency Bill argue as though the legislation has all of the risks and that no risk whatever attaches to the option of doing nothing. A positive development in the debate in the House over the past week has been a much clearer focus on the need to take action and on the risk of doing nothing. However much political parties might disagree - Fine Gael has put forward its own proposals and the Labour Party has it own ideas on how matters should be addressed - one consensus is emerging, which is that the risk of doing nothing is the worst of all worlds. It is possible that if nothing were done the banks would limp along unable to support any commercial activity, which unfortunately to a huge extent is the case at present, or ultimately and perhaps very likely in the case of one institution, collapse entirely.

One of the improvements in the debate that must be acknowledged is that people have come to realise that the State cannot function properly without a properly functioning banking sector. Even at the level of the ordinary citizen who is not centrally involved in any type of commercial activity, people have come to realise that if matters were to continue as they are it would not be too long until each of us would run the risk of having a plastic card that would not perform when one went to an ATM. That is putting it at a low level in terms of the ordinary consumer. In terms of commercial activity, the difficulties which have beset the banking sector here and internationally have made it extraordinarily difficult for businesses, which have no connection to any property transactions or bank shares, to function in any sensible or workable manner.

This country is small with a free open market economy and it is not always acknowledged that this approach has brought enormous benefits to the country. In a very short period we went from having approximately 1.1 million people employed to having 2.1 million people employed. This is very close to a doubling of the number of people employed. While this has dropped to approximately 1.9 million people, it is still a huge advance on our initial position. In the midst of all the doom and gloom and very real difficulties which beset the economy and individual families where jobs have been lost and young people have gone through college or apprenticeships and are not in a position to get employment, we forget that as a nation we have a great capacity to manufacture goods and provide services to an extraordinarily high standard. There are a number of reasons for this.

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