Joe Costello (Dublin Central, Labour)

I am delighted to have an opportunity to say a few words on this Bill. It is the first legislative proposal to deal with the flawed regulatory and supervisory mechanism that was in place until now. We certainly need a better system of regulation and supervision. We need to ensure there is integrity and that the structures put in place are not flawed and are subject to subversion. The proposals for a new, single unified Central Bank of Ireland commission will hopefully go some of the way towards achieving these goals. However, the proposals will not be successful unless they are backed up by a strong EU supervisory framework that insists on the proper independent regulatory mechanisms working in the first place. Nor will they be successful unless there is a strong political motivation to ensure they operate properly.

We need structures, proper personnel and proper political leadership. We did not have any of these in the past, but we need them for the future. It is an amazing sign of the times that the IMF has today called for a banking stability fund to have a pot of money available to cope with future bank bail-outs. The situation is pretty dire.

It is now nearly two years since the bubble burst, yet the economy is still in sharp decline. We are finding more nuggets of nasty information every day. It is like turning over a stone and finding creepy-crawlies everywhere. There is no sign of an end to the creepy-crawlies. There is a bewildering array of irregular transactions coming to light at Anglo Irish Bank, and the most recent has been the €200 million fund that was transferred from a German bank to give the impression that Anglo Irish Bank was in a healthy state of liquidity. The board members were more or less sworn to secrecy not to say a word about it in case it would leak out to the financial markets and it would be discovered that Anglo Irish Bank was on its uppers.

NAMA is finding out that only a third of the portfolios it is acquiring have any meaningful commercial value. We are fully coming to terms with the extraordinary events at Irish Nationwide, a building society that was set up to give mortgages to home borrowers. We now find that 80% of its operations was for speculative property transactions. No regulator shouted "Stop", nor did any Minister for Finance see what was going on in the past few years. No civil servant in the Department of Finance copped what was going on there. It is extraordinary that a body was not engaged in its core function, but got involved in something completely different.

People who bought their homes in the past seven years are in negative equity. There are 30,000 homeowners who are three or more months in mortgage arrears, while another 30,000 have changed to interest only mortgages because they cannot pay back the premium. They will be in dire straits following an increase in interest rates. Forty thousand people emigrated in 2009, while a further 60,000 are expected to have departed the country by the end of this year. That is back to the worst days of the 1980s and the 1950s. This is due to the lack of regulation and the lack of political control that has allowed the meltdown to take place.

At the Labour Party conference in Galway last weekend, we made a promise to conduct a full inquiry into what has gone on. We have made this call and it does not matter whether this limited private inquiry proposed by the Government takes place. It is not adequate.

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