Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)

The doubling of the national debt today is significant. A total of €11 billion has been put in to recapitalise the banks and later we will vote on NAMA spending €43 billion to acquire toxic loans. The Minister stated €11 billion will be used for recapitalisation, most of which will go to Anglo Irish Bank, and a further €10 billion will be paid to that bank later. We are, therefore, being presented with a debt of €75 billion. People outside the House are flabbergasted by the scale of what is happening and they have worry heaped upon worry. Today, bad practices in the Quinn Group have resulted in the new Financial Regulator going to court to put two of its companies into administration. This is another worry for taxpayers and another potential bill that will come home to them to pay.

These are troubling times and the onus is on us in the House to take great care about the decisions we take. That is what we must do in undertaking scrutiny of what is before us. Our economy is in deep crisis and recovery depends on the choices we make today. I believe the Government is choosing to nurse along the bad decisions of the past to protect professional investors whose risk capital helped to protect them from any loss and that choice will put a huge squeeze on the capacity of the Government, or any future Government, to carve out a recovery strategy. A sum of €75 billion, of which €40 billion will go to Anglo Irish Bank alone, will dramatically constrain our freedom of manoeuvre to invest in our future and that has to be acknowledged.

It is important that the debate be conducted on the basis of hard evidence and not on myths. I am appalled that I still hear myths from the Government, which I would like to nail now. I have heard it argued time and again by Government spokesmen that failure to protect bondholders in the banks would amount to a default by the Irish people on its obligations. That is simply not true and even the Taoiseach repeats that myth time and again in the House. The debts run up by Seán FitzPatrick in creating his buccaneering bank are not taxpayer commitments. They were not borrowed by the taxpayer.

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