Michael D Higgins (Galway West, Labour)

Proper business, yes. That tells us a lot. It gives significance to where we are going. I hope the Minister realises we are supporting his suggestion if he is talking about a change of culture. There must be a change of culture and process, and transparency must be introduced. There must also be an opportunity for those who are elected to be able to try to move the economy on to a safer place. Some space must be provided where people who are concerned about the public interest will be able to come to a committee and offer oversight or opinions on policy.

The Minister has already appointed a public interest director to Anglo Irish Bank and to the other banks that come under the guarantee scheme, but they sit there, trammelled in regard to the public interest because they are directors under the Companies Acts and they are limited in what they can do. That is why we do not get a geek out of them on all of the issues that are being discussed on the street and by those who care for a sound financial system. Some of them are so changed that they have become bankers. They have decided, for example, that when they entered the holy circle they understood how magic was made and all the members of the public, including the elected representatives of which they were once numbered, do not understand this complicated stuff where people used to give themselves €1 million for inflating their ego.

The Labour Party supports amendment No. 2, but we stress the importance of amendment No. 4, which proposes the setting up of an oversight committee because we believe it is to be perhaps the most important of all. I am deliberately focusing on this amendment because the other one which I am particularly interested in occurs much later. It relates to the gagging clause on the chief executive and the chairman. Between now and when we get to that amendment the Minister should ask his officials to have a good, long, slow look at what is happening with Professor Nutt and his colleagues across the water. One will see then the consequences of requiring someone to come to a committee and say he or she will not produce anything on his or her computer, not have a bad thought about the Government, not say anything that would upset any Minister or the Government, and that he or she is willing to be chief executive or chairman. If the Minister gets such a person to intellectually spancel themselves like that, they would not be worth much.

We are back to the issue of whose committee it is to be; the Government's or the party that forms part of the Government, and what is to be the status of the people who are attending it? We will discuss that in detail when we come to it. The most important thing about those two committees is that there should not be any suggestion to us that it is really a matter now of finishing off this Bill rather quickly and getting on with things the way we were. I would repeat everything I said. I would say every word of it publicly about all of the people I mentioned who have disgracefully damaged this country. As I read in Senator Ross's book, there was this little network, this clique, who moved from one position to another, sometimes chief executive, tomorrow chairman and then one went back on the board.

Reference was made to a definition of a niche bank. What is a niche bank? It operates on the basis that the potential borrower enters into a relationship with the assistant manager, he or she identifies a particular project and, as they say in the Enid Blyton books, two go gambling together. That is what the niche bank was. It was no more systemic than a dandelion. What one means by being systemic is that it is so bad that it can scandalously degrade the reputation of the other parts of the banking system. It is systemic in its toxicity and in its consequences. That is why the Minister should accept amendments Nos. 2 and 4, and he should do so with a flourish and say he is introducing transparency and accountability into banking.

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