Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour)

That does not mean the Governor of the Central Bank does not make his views known to the Minister and to the Department of Finance, and I am not referring just to the quarterly reports. It is not acceptable that the governor points to the paragraph at the bottom of page 28 of the report of 2006 and says: "There it is. I alerted you to the credit expansion problem, the danger of the bubble and so forth".

I recall when the estimable previous governor appeared before the DIRT inquiry. He told us, quite properly at the time, that his role was not a consumer role. A number of questions were asked about taxation, evasion issues and so forth. I asked him what exactly he did. He replied that he was responsible for the prudential supervision of the banks. Unless this committee is enabled to ask the chief executive of NAMA meaningful questions and get meaningful answers, it will be a fig leaf. That would be a great pity.

The Department of Finance, the Financial Regulator and the Central Bank must accept their huge share of responsibility for what has happened. One can talk all one likes about government, the Minister for Finance, the policy decisions, the global financial crisis and letting Lehman Brothers fail but, ultimately, if those agencies had been doing their jobs as they ought when the credit expansion was allowed to grow unhindered in this economy, our situation would be somewhat and probably considerably better than it is. I am not sure there is an acceptance of that. There was no statement from the Financial Regulator, either before he left or since then, stating, "I was wrong and derelict. My people did not have the information". I do not believe he can say that.

The Department of Finance has not explained why it got matters so badly wrong over so many years and especially why it allowed this bubble to grow in the economy without interference. The record of the Central Bank in public documents or in the documents that are accessible to those who are not members of the Government or the Minister for Finance does not show, even on close subsequent reading, an alertness to the problems that were building.

If we provide that Dáil Éireann or the Oireachtas will have an oversight role, that role must be meaningful. Otherwise, it is not worth the candle. If people have the mindset that they are responsible to the Minister for Finance and that their job is to obfuscate before committees of the House, it will not work.

There are huge issues of national interest at stake here. There are sensitive issues that go to the heart of the country's reputation. There are also sensitive issues about the sheer scale of the taxpayers' investment involved, as well as sensitive issues about state aid and its implications. That is why I have been more equivocal on the creation of the SPV than many commentators outside the House. I do not know if it is significant that the EUROSTAT approval is no longer on the website or why that is the case. The document ought to be laid formally before the House by the Minister. There are a number of matters in that approval to which we will return under the relevant sections of the Bill.

Amendment No. 2 proposes that it shall be the job of the committee to review the shareholders agreement. Many commentators have said they were taken aback by this development but even those who are inclined to see the SPV merely as a technical device to avoid having this additional debt taken into account in the national accounts are puzzled as to how the Minister can assure us that NAMA will still be calling the shots. With a construct where private equity is the majority shareholder, is it feasible and safe that NAMA, by way of shareholders agreement and a veto for NAMA, is calling the shots rather than the private interest?

Consider the document that Deputy Burton opened at the beginning of today's session. It is extremely difficult for the informed, interested and concerned public to reach conclusions about the issues before us when one sees the contents of that document, based on expert advice presented by Merrill Lynch at enormous cost to the taxpayer. If one talked to the porter in the Shelbourne Hotel at the same stage that document was compiled, he would have given a more reliable steer on the future of Anglo Irish Bank, its soundness and whether it was systemic to the banking system. It does not surprise me that the Minister tried to find advice wherever he might get it. If that is the type of official advice he was getting, it is a cause for alarm.

The Minister said in response to Deputy Burton that a niche bank can be systemic, as if that was the end of the debate. This bank had nothing to do with the money transmission system, did not have a high street presence and was essentially a credit union for billionaire developers. How he can say it was a systemic bank is beyond me.

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