Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

I thank those who have contributed to the debate on the Labour Party's proposed strategic investment bank. We are not accepting the Sinn Féin amendment. In a recent article in Rolling Stone, the American writer, Matt Taibbi, compared an American bank to a "great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money". He was talking about Goldman Sachs, but it seems to me that he could have been talking about Fianna Fáil's own Anglo Irish Bank or, on a minor scale, about Irish Nationwide. In a way, that is from where the need for a strategic investment bank comes. It is something Fianna Fáil does not really understand. I noted the half-praise from the Minister and other Fianna Fáil speakers, which may reflect Fianna Fáil's distant history. The Labour Party has proposed the establishment of a strategic investment bank to address two critical market failures. I remind the Minister, who is a capitalist, that in capitalism it is permitted to use state initiatives to address clear market failures. Capitalists agree on that. Socialists accept it as a given, of course, because we do not hold the market as a God in the way Fianna Fáil does nowadays. The two market failures to which I refer are the shortage of financing for small and medium sized enterprises and the critical shortage of investment in infrastructure for the future.

Having listened to a number of Fianna Fáil contributors this evening and last night, it is clear some of them have never heard of Seán Lemass. They certainly do not have any knowledge of some of the initiatives he took, particularly during the Second World War, when market failure was a critical feature of native Irish capital. A series of initiatives was taken by Fianna Fáil and other parties in government to interest such key market failures. In our proposal for a strategic investment bank, we propose an initial upfront investment of €2 billion from the National Pensions Reserve Fund into a new vehicle which would raise funds to be channelled into Ireland's small and medium sized enterprise sector and into vital infrastructure. The Minister asked, quite reasonably, why a new vehicle is necessary when the National Pensions Reserve Fund already exists. The reason is that the Minister has given an extraordinary set of responsibilities, in the context of the banking crisis, to the National Treasury Management Agency.

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