Mary Upton (Dublin South Central, Labour)

The Government's decision not to hold a public inquiry into the banking crisis is nothing short of a disgrace. It is an insult to our intelligence to pretend this is a public inquiry; it is anything but. Anyone with an interest in politics and current affairs has read the many books dealing with how decisions were taken in smoky rooms, almost always by men who claim to know what was best for their country. In politics, construction and banking, it appears a small coterie of people effectively decided the policy of the State and the impact this would have on citizens. They behaved as if they had all the answers and were masters of the universe. They were wrong then and Government is wrong now to hold what is in effect a private inquiry.

It seems this Government is so desperate to protect itself and the bankers who ran rings round it for years that it has truly lost touch with the people of the country. The citizens of Ireland realise that they and their children will pay for the mess the Irish economy is in for years to come. They know the excessive mortgages, which hundreds of thousands of people are saddled with, are a direct result of the banking policy to triple bank credit relative to GNP in just 11 years. They realise the banks will not lend enough money for years to come as they desperately seek to repair their balance sheets.

The public wants openness, honesty and a real investigation into what went wrong in the Irish banking and financial sectors, why it went wrong and who is responsible. This requires a public investigation, not a report conducted in private. The only Oireachtas oversight proposed is that of the committee packed with and chaired by Fianna Fáil Members. The Government is so petrified of having to take responsibility for its actions during the Celtic tiger that it is willing to sanction a whitewash. If we are to learn the lessons from the collapse in Irish banking and to ensure this will never happen again, we must have a public inquiry that deals with every facet of the crisis in an open and transparent manner.

I listened to Deputy Mulcahy last night when he was asked about the timeframe of this inquiry and whether it would include September 2008. He gave the usual evasive answer about his opinion. We are not interested in opinions; we want facts. From reading this, it appears to the rest of us that anything beyond September 2008 or from the beginning of September 2008 is outside the remit of this investigation. So much happened beyond that date but we get opinions and no facts. This means the banking guarantee is not within the remit of the investigation. Is this because the Government does not want it to emerge how it was hoodwinked by the bankers into offering blanket support to the Irish banks? Is it because the Government does not want the public to realise how much it knew about the perilous state of Anglo Irish Bank? To limit the terms of the investigation to September 2008 is a whitewash. Everything the Government has done with the banking system flows from the bank guarantee scheme hatched one night in Government Buildings. The Labour Party voted against the bank guarantee, which was the right decision. Bailing out banks to the tune of €11 billion, nationalising Anglo Irish Bank and establishing NAMA all became necessary because the Government had to take these actions once the guarantee was in place. Otherwise, the guarantee would have been called upon, thus bankrupting the State.

Another matter must be addressed by an inquiry and may not be addressed by the Government's private inquiry. I refer to the complicity of the media in stoking the property bubble. A few years ago, property was such a big earner for newspapers that the properties sections were often as large as the rest of the newspaper. The media happily quoted the pet economists of the banks, who told us the property sector remained strong and the fundamentals were sound. One could hardly open a newspaper without being told of the mythical property ladder. Where is the property ladder now? Is it stored away in someone's garage, has it been repossessed or is the property ladder to be purchased by NAMA, perhaps with a 30% discount meaning the loss of the few steps? The role of the media and others with a financial interest in effectively scaring people into purchasing houses at grossly inflated prices, with the threat that they had to get on the ladder, needs to be investigated by a public inquiry.

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