Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

I wish to share time with Deputy Joanna Tuffy. The Ceann Comhairle might tell me when five minutes have elapsed.

Anyone who is elected to this House as one of 166 representatives continually feels it is an honour and a privilege to be asked by citizens to be their representative in the Dáil. However, what has been lost on the Government, particularly the Fianna Fáil element of the Government which has now been in power for 12 years, is the fact that at this time of major economic crisis people in Ireland are not just watching coverage of the Dáil, but are also tuning in from time to time to coverage of other Parliaments, particularly the House of Commons and the Houses of Congress in the United States. Some people also watch coverage of the French Parliament. Most people who have television here have access to those channels.

What is stunning in the context of Deputy Rabbitte's Bill is that we are currently enveloped in the greatest economic crisis this country and many other countries have ever seen since the 1920s and people's interest in politics and political accountability is at an extraordinarily level. As politicians, all of us should welcome that fact.

In the United Kingdom, the bankers who have been deemed to be culpable to a degree in the collapse of banking institutions in the UK have already been before several committees of the House of Commons, individually and collectively.

In the United States there have been umpteen committee hearings. We have also seen the system the United States operates under Professor Elizabeth Warren, which is basically oversight, which reports to the Houses of Congress on everything to do with the banks. It is up on the website. One can "tweet" her and get information from her, yet this country appears to be locked in post-Colonial aspic. It is as though we inherited our parliamentary system from the United Kingdom. They moved on but we did not to the same extent. I say that in a non-partisan way.

People endlessly confess now to tuning in compulsively to "Oireachtas Report", which Deputy Rabbitte once said was for insomniacs and people who slumped in front of the television exhausted after a long night out. People are now consciously watching coverage of the Dáil and what Deputy Rabbitte has put forward in the Bill, and I congratulate him on this, is an opportunity for us to reform our procedures and meet the demand from people who believe this is their Parliament, we represent them and we will bring people like the bankers to some degree of account in explaining the policy that has led to our economic ruination.

The Green Party Members are not present but I would have thought this particular philosophy would be a central belief of everything I have ever known about the Green Party, including those I served with on county councils when I was a councillor.

The British playwright, David Hare, has a play running in the UK at the moment called "The Power of Yes". It deals with the issue Deputy Higgins raised earlier, which is that when we have a powerful Executive combined with a powerful establishment in banking and in the media, all of whom are telling us to say "Yes" in one direction only, very little stands between that enormous surge of power. The Government came in here on 29 September 2008 and told us that we must sign up to the guarantee to Anglo Irish Bank. We were told last year that we must put €11 billion in the banks at a time when the Government was cutting old age pensioners' Christmas bonuses and social welfare recipients' entitlements. The power of "Yes" in this country from the point of view of an establishment of professional people who were involved in banking - the bankers themselves, the developers and the Fianna Fáil Party - has combined to make it almost unquestionable.

Deputy Rabbitte is suggesting in his Bill-----

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