Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)

I must express my huge disappointment with the Minister's response. If we have learned anything from banking crises in other countries and analyses of them from the IMF and others, the one common thread is that there must broad political consensus around a proposed solution with proper transparency and scrutiny of the asset recovery process. As we have seen from the IMF, in cases where there is not proper scrutiny, politically motivated intentions take over in asset recovery vehicles. When controlled by bureaucracies, these vehicles fail to fulfil for the taxpayer the recovery of assets needed.

We have the opportunity to provide proper transparency. Instead we have a Bill proposing the establishment of a body that has no obligations under the Freedom of Information Act. It will have no register of the loans that can be viewed by the public. There is to be no comment by NAMA executives on policy when they attend an Oireachtas committee meeting. There will be no information as to how much the chief executive officer will be paid, no watchdog and no sight of a business plan which would show the credible foundation for undertaking this decision on public moneys.

Instead there will be business plans in the future in which the Minister can, at his own whim, declare a matter confidential so that it is concealed from the Oireachtas. This is not transparency. If the Minister has been so sucked into the maw of the Department of Finance that he believes this is transparency to the Oireachtas, he better have a period on the backbenches to rediscover what it is to hold the Government and its agencies accountable as is our statutory duty and the purpose for which we were elected.

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