Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

I was talking to a business person this morning who last year was employing 15 people and this year is employing nine people. He is desperately trying to keep those nine people in employment. Similar to the experiences of other business people around the country his bank called him in last week to tell him that they were going to increase the charges and interest rates applying to the facilities that he enjoys from his bank. In a nutshell, that is why we need oversight. All of us in this Chamber, including the Minister, are fully aware that banks are putting the squeeze on business in an attempt to recover the profits that they have lost because of the crash and to get their share price up again. The Minister has told us repeatedly, and we in the Opposition all agree with him, that his objective in this package is to get credit flowing to small and medium businesses.

I worked in business before I was a lecturer. All of us who have worked in business know that that is an extremely challenging environment, no matter who is Minister for Finance. What we are asking for is oversight because if the Minister gives in to the banks in the way he is proposing to do, as I said previously, the banks will astonish him with their sheer ungratefulness as they literally go back to business as usual; back to the bonuses, the big salaries and to fleecing businesses with banking costs that are way out of line and over and above what people incur in other European countries.

The Minister is being the sugar daddy of all times to the banking system and, boy, do the banks know it. He is in a unique position, as sugar daddies usually are, to ask a favour of the person to whom he is giving all the sugar. That is what the relationship is. Instead, nobly, on behalf of taxpayers the Minister is saying he will forgo the insight, oversight and publication of information that will put stuff out there that will help us to get a viable working banking system. Instead we will retreat behind the old structures of the Department of Finance, which is completely outmoded for this tsunami that has affected the Irish banking system. New thinking is required. What we need to do is to open it up to oversight. The establishment of an oversight panel with regular reporting in the public domain is probably the most important thing that can be done to ensure that credit really does flow and that there is some brake or restraint on the banks and bankers returning to behaviour as usual. The banks can produce all the fancy diagrams and statistics they wish but the reality is they are trying to de-leverage and shrink their balance sheets. They are also obviously finding it more difficult to get credit-worthy propositions to which they can lend.

The main issue is that they are shrinking their balance sheets in an attempt to recover their capital. If they shrink their balance sheets to the extent they propose, the consequence will be that unless foreign banks come to Ireland and lend to Irish businesses, many Irish businesses and individuals who are good prospects for business or house purchase lending in a depressed market will not get loans. Can we rely on foreign banks coming back into the Irish market? I do not believe we can for two to three years. At present, most foreign owned banks operating in Ireland would prefer to leave this country and sell their Irish subsidiaries. They have been badly burnt by their Irish experience. Furthermore, their home countries are telling them, understandably, that they should bring their business back home. The Dutch and UK Governments want to concentrate their banking bail-out packages on the core business of their countries' banks for their countries' businesses.

It will require a deal of courage on the Minister's part to opt for something that is unusual in a small country such as Ireland, that is, the regular publication of information in the public domain. By all means, bring that information to a Dáil oversight committee but such a committee will be of limited value. According to the draft business plan and the Minister's subsequent remarks, the €54 billion of loans will be transferred between the establishment date of NAMA and probably seven months later at 30 day intervals. By the time a Dáil committee is up and running, most of the action will be over. That is why in the case of the asset relief programmes in the United States the reporting has been up-to-date on a monthly basis. The Minister said he will provide quarterly information and I welcomed that, but he needs to go several steps further and provide for oversight.

The Minister also promised, in response to the Committee Stage debate on this amendment, that he would provide some type of process auditor. We have seen the elaborate, if not labyrinthine, process diagram at the back of the business plan, but I do not see an amendment from the Minister in respect of the indication he gave the committee. That, at least, was some additional information but it was not sufficient. I refer to the elaborate diagram on page 35 of the draft business plan.

I intend to press the Labour Party amendment relating to oversight. I am happy to support the Fine Gael amendment as well but, as I said previously, I do not believe now is the time to establish extra Dáil committees unless, given the importance of this particular committee, at least one to three other committees are abolished or unless this special committee is, in effect, a sub-committee of one of the existing committees, such as the Committee of Public Accounts, the finance committee or the regulatory affairs committee. Taxpayers will not take kindly to the Dáil basically saying that its response to NAMA is to set up another committee. The Houses of the Oireachtas Commission has already put forward proposals to reduce significantly the number of committees. That is in the power of the Taoiseach and the Minister for Finance but we should not create extra committees unless we get rid of some of the surplus committees that exist at present.

That said, I am happy otherwise to support the Fine Gael amendment. However, it is not enough. The critical thing is that the Minister must try to provide information to citizens so they can understand what NAMA is about, in view of the fact that the consequences are so long term. They do not just apply to people who will be working over the next ten years but to people who will be working over the next 40 years.

The Minister introduced the special purpose vehicle, SPV, as a clever accounting trick to get the NAMA debt off the country's balance sheet. That does not fool anybody. Everybody knows that even though the SPV gets the debt into a footnote to the national accounts, the bond markets, international markets and the EU include it in our national debt and price our debt accordingly. I do not see the Minister bringing forward amendments to provide for greater oversight and transparency with regard to the special purpose vehicle. The special purpose vehicle changes NAMA fundamentally and changes the span of control and influence in NAMA to a critical group of investors of €51 million who will have key decision making powers, key oversight and influence and key membership of an inside group in NAMA. This is all for just €51 million, which is chicken feed to many of the people who operate in international banking. It is not chicken feed to anybody in the Dáil but it is to international bankers and pension fund managers.

In the example in France which the Minister quoted, the people who took the interest in the SPV were the banks who were to be the beneficiary of the French arrangements. They did it through pension funds, as is likely to happen here. The Irish Association of Investment Managers, which is heavily linked to the two big banks and Irish Life & Permanent, could come up with that money at a moment's notice. Why would anybody invest in the SPV? They would do so if they had a connection to a bank and if it gave them a unique position in terms of control, information, insight and influence. According to people such as George Soros and other major international financiers, the one item that is prized above all else is information. To pay €51 million for a permanent inside seat with regard to information on the Irish banking system for a ten year period and to have a good chance of getting that money back is an investment which I believe most operators will not have to be asked twice to make. While I am referring to pension funds this could also apply to hedge fund and private equity people, who will use that position to play the Irish market in a way that will not be to our advantage.

For these reasons, I urge the Minister to accept the concept of an oversight committee. He must take courage and say to the people who are accustomed to doing business in Ireland behind closed doors and secret bank walls that they should come out into the light and let the people who are meeting the €54 billion debt and providing the guarantee have some information about what is being done in their name.

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