Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

He was. He was such an optimist that I often wondered what did he take for his breakfast, because it could not just have been porridge. It must have had something extra special in it. The Minister needs to look at the totality and the composition of the banks' behaviour. They boosted the markets, but that is in the past and they have crashed. Equally, they are not necessarily being entirely forthcoming at the moment about what is happening. They are not telling us about rolled-over debt, overdrafts, term loans and so on. The conditionality and the charges for these loans change, and that gets qualified as something new, rather than as a roll-over. The Minister needs to be very tough with them, and unless he finds some ingenious and inventive ways of following this up, we will all be fooled by them. I think the Minister is foolish not to be much tougher with them in a situation where his capacity to influence them is relatively limited.

He needs a big leap of the imagination to get these guys moving on these issues, because they have no intention of moving. They can produce all the fancy documents they like on instructions to lend a certain amount to the SME sector. These are nothing but fancy documents. In private conversation, they will cheerfully acknowledge that fact, saying that credit risks are bad and so on. There needs to be fresh thinking from the Financial Regulator, the Central Bank and the Department.

I used to have a part-time job when I was a student doing phone collections for one of the big companies in Ireland in those days. So much banking and business is inter-personal. One does not send somebody a guideline and have no follow up. It is a bit like getting the vote. If only leaflets were sent, there would not be many of us here. The Minister needs to go out and talk to people. The people from the Financial Regulator, the Central Bank and the Department need to get real on all of this. This is business. How many people just throw leaflets in the bin? Such leaflets would hit approximately 20% of the target audience. I doubt that people in the banks are desperately anxious to read leaflets from the Department of Finance which contain guidelines to lend more. It will stretch the ingenuity of the Minister and his senior officials, but it must be done if we are going to move on this.

Cash savings are going down at the moment. People seem to be paying off things like credit card debt, and are possibly putting money back in the mattress like they did before the guarantee. We do not know for sure why these savings are going down, but the fact is that they are going down, as we know from Central Bank reports. Just being a nice guy to the banks is not good enough. Fifty four billion is a hell of a lot of niceness. It will be difficult for the banks, but it is desperate for the rest of us if we do not force them to do this.

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