Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

The people of this country are in a state of shock this morning and somewhat bewildered by the huge size of the figures and scale of the amount of money that will have to be paid for the bail-out of Anglo Irish Bank. I saw a figure this morning of €200,000 million a year in the budget. This is the sum of all the cutbacks that have taken place in health, education and social welfare. We are being told it could cost up to €40,000 million to keep Anglo Irish Bank going and the Taoiseach says it could cost even more to wind it up. The reason we are between such a rock and a hard place now over Anglo Irish Bank is because the Taoiseach provided a State guarantee for it.

On 28 September 2008, the day before the State guarantee was brought in and which included Anglo Irish Bank, that bank was a private bank. The Taoiseach could told anyone who had invested in that bank or purchased bonds in it or loaned it money they had made an unwise business decision and that they would have to take the consequences or at the very least, if there was to be State intervention at that stage, that the State would have been in a position to negotiate with those bondholders. Instead, the Taoiseach told them not to worry about it because the State would look after it and the taxpayer would pay. He wrote a blank cheque for them. Yesterday, the details of that blank cheque were filled in.

I can understand the case for a State guarantee for high street banks and building societies but I have never been able to understand what is the case for the State guarantee and the nature and extent of that guarantee provided to Anglo Irish Bank which, after all, was a piggy bank for property speculators. The Taoiseach has stated he made that decision on the best possible advice. Earlier this year, he refused a motion from the Labour Party for an investigation or an inquiry into how that decision was made to provide such a guarantee to Anglo Irish Bank and for which we had to pay up yesterday.

Will the Taoiseach release all of the papers and all the advices available to him in September 2008 when he and his Government decided to provide a State guarantee for Anglo Irish Bank? Will he tell the House who lobbied on behalf of Anglo Irish Bank in advance of that decision being made? Will he tell the House why a decision was made, as I asked at the time, to include dated subordinated debt in that extensive guarantee?

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