Michael D Higgins (Galway West, Labour)

These are all the correct words. I am sure that, in many cases, the ordinary, average shareholders in Bank of Ireland and Allied Irish Banks debated whether one should pay €500,000 or €1.5 million to the people in charge of those banks. Some of the deals negotiated were obscene. The argument in their favour was that the system involved gambling of such a sophisticated international kind that one might lose the directors to somewhere else if one did not pay them so much.

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