Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

May I continue the point? We are not talking about ordinary law. We are talking about banking and international global banking systems which have crashed, to the detriment of millions of ordinary people throughout the world. We are not talking about ordinary law but about banking institutions which have used their might and main to have part of their transactions and part of their subsidiaries in jurisdictions which are established almost entirely for tax avoidance, commercial secrecy and flouting the ordinary commercial law of many countries. That is why President Obama, after his election, said that if we are to make progress on a regulated international financial structure of banking and trade we must get rid of tax havens.

What advice has the Minister taken from his officials on the use of tax havens in the organisational structure of banks? I include those banks which are in the guarantee scheme, and therefore automatically fall into the framework of the NAMA legislation, and the Irish subsidiaries of foreign owned banks which, we understand, may also apply. This is a perfectly clear question. What advice has he taken on this thorny problem?

At last week's meeting of the G20, people who had laughed at the notion of the Tobin tax as a nutty professor's idea, were speaking in favour of a Tobin type tax on currency transactions or some other kind of levy or penalty. Even people like Gordon Brown——

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