Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

The Taoiseach's response to the call for a public inquiry - I heard the Minister for Finance this morning making the same point - is to attack the idea of a tribunal. Nobody is proposing the establishment of a tribunal. What the Labour Party has proposed is that there should be a parliamentary inquiry similar to the DIRT inquiry. The Government should stop knocking something that has not been proposed in the first place.

There are two issues here, first, whether the inquiry will be public or private. Fianna Fáil wants a private inquiry. The rest of us want a public inquiry. The decision on that will be made tonight when we vote on the Labour Party motion and every Member of the House, including the Green Party Ministers and Deputies who claim they want a public inquiry, will have the opportunity to vote for a private or public inquiry at 8.30 p.m.

What I want to concentrate on is the content of the Government's proposed inquiry. Yesterday, the Minister for Finance said that inquiry would not be permitted to examine decisions taken by the Government since the crisis erupted, such as the nationalisation of Anglo Irish Bank or the decision to introduce the bank guarantee scheme. I heard him on radio this morning making a similar suggestion.

Suppose the British Government took that approach to the current inquiry on the Iraq war, which we see on television. It would have an inquiry which would be questioning whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and what the United Nations discussed and decided, but the only thing into which it would not be able to inquire would be the British Government's decision to go to war, which of course would have the convenient consequence that Mr. Blair would not have to appear as a witness, as he is on Friday, and nor would Mr. Hoon.

What the Government is doing here is setting up an inquiry into everything about banking, including the international context, except the Government's own decisions, such as the critical decision to introduce the guarantee scheme, which is what has locked the Irish taxpayer into paying for the banking crisis. There were several issues involved in September 2008, particularly on 29 September 2008, which require to be investigated and require answers. With whom did members of the Government meet on that date? Why was a decision taken to give a guarantee to Anglo Irish Bank?

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