Joe Costello (Dublin Central, Labour)

I support this amendment fully. We are talking about the entire public sector, from the most lowly paid to the highest, all of whom will be affected by the cuts. The most lowly paid, up to €30,000, will face cuts of 5% and there was no attempt, good, bad or indifferent to have a threshold that might poverty-proof in any way the legislation we are putting through.

The public sector has always said it is not in any way responsible for the economic crisis, but its members are not the beneficiaries of NAMA. Its provisions extend only to those who were the cause of the economic crisis. There is no bailout for the public sector while there is for those who caused the crisis. Here is an opportunity to look at one of the institutions which caused the economic collapse, namely, Anglo Irish Bank. This bank, because of its culture, was largely responsible for what happened within the Irish financial system. Everybody in the financial world was in a "keeping up with the Joneses" mode, and the "Joneses" of the day was Anglo Irish Bank.

Anglo Irish was doing its thing in a fraudulent fashion, hiding and moving money around the place, operating in a manner that corrupted itself, other banks and indeed the docklands in its operations. Now Anglo is a State-owned bank, into which the State has injected €4 billion. Is there any reason we should not include Anglo Irish Bank within the parameters of this legislation? It simply should be done. Symbolically, it should be done. At least the message would go out as regards the people who were, to a large extent, responsible for the culture that brought about the bubble and the collapse, not to mention the people on the Government side who aided and abetted it. I am not talking about the ordinary workers but the people in the dysfunctional boardroom of Anglo Irish, who were pulling the strings. Why should they not now be included within the remit of this legislation? It would seem to anybody who believes that some element of justice should be done that they should be included - for that reason alone, apart from having some element of sanction in place for all that they did.

Almost €28 billion, nearly 50% of the money we are talking about as regards NAMA in terms of portfolios and loans, relate to Anglo Irish Bank. That is a colossal albatross, as Deputy Rabbitte has said. Those who earn €1 to those who earn €100,000 plus must buy into the payments that the Government is inflicting on us. However, we cannot extend the remit to include the higher paid staff and board of directors of Anglo Irish Bank. We should go a step further by accepting the Opposition recommendations of an Oireachtas inquiry into that particular bank. If things were done properly, the Criminal Assets Bureau should have been knocking on the door at an early stage. The public will have to bear the brunt of the €1.3 billion in savings that the Government has targeted in the public and social welfare sectors. It is not too late for this House to send out the message that Anglo Irish Bank, which introduced the culture of corruption into the banking system on a large scale, should now be a recipient of the provisions of this legislation.

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