Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

I join with the statement of the Minister of State on the report of the Saville inquiry. It is interesting that the new British Prime Minister gave an extraordinarily heartfelt apology. It was a very statesmanlike way to revisit the past policies of previous British Administrations.

Coming to our debate, a week is most definitely a long time in politics. The focus of media attention is on Fine Gael but the focus of this debate is on the Taoiseach, Deputy Brian Cowen. The focus of next general election will also be on him and on what Fianna Fáil did in failing the country. It is Deputy Brian Cowen who more than anyone else must survey the wreckage that now surrounds him. His supporters hoped and expected that the international examiners, Regling and Watson, would give the beleaguered Taoiseach a get out of jail card. Instead, they did the opposite and identified domestic policy failures by Deputy Brian Cowen as Minister for Finance as the primary cause of Ireland's current economic woes. The terms they used to describe the property bubble were "homemade", "plain" and "vanilla". The mumblings of the Taoiseach's loyalists in defence of their hero ring hollow because he is as much the culprit as the casualty of the circumstances that now threaten to overwhelm him.

Much of the present crisis is of the Taoiseach's own making. He can argue that he inherited much from Deputy Bertie Ahern as Taoiseach and Deputy Charlie McCreevy as Minister for Finance but he should have taken responsibility as a leader. Instead, he took the inheritance and failed to deal with the legacy of toxic and poisonous issues that faced him when he came to his desk. He reminds me of the Charles Dickens character from David Copperfield, Mr. Micawber, who was always certain that "something will turn up". Something did turn up. It was called Anglo Irish Bank but he willfully ignored it.

Warning bells about Anglo Irish Bank rang time and again in the spring of 2008, with the St. Patrick's day massacre in its share value and the collapse of the share price. In his report, the Governor of the Central Bank, Mr. Honohan, goes back even further to show that the warning signals were known to the authorities even earlier but former Minister for Finance, Deputy Cowen, postponed any remedial action and through most of 2008 continued to ignore the gathering clouds. Surely the Northern Rock collapse in the UK in the late summer of 2007 should have been enough to force a reappraisal of policy on our own economy's excessive exposure to construction as the country's primary engine of growth and public revenue. It was a love affair that had gone on too long and had become toxic.

I want to look at two aspects that feature in the reports. In his defence, the Taoiseach, Deputy Cowen, analysed the reports even when they are highly critical of him and his predecessors as Taoiseach and Minister for Finance. The Cabinet held on to the two reports for as long as ten days before they were ready to publish them. That tells its own tale of the shockwave that must have gone through Government Buildings when Ministers first read them. They needed ten days, and an effective Dáil adjournment of a week, to go through both reports with a fine toothcomb just to find some tiny crumbs of comfort they could use to claim vindication of their policies for the whole of the past decade. Crumbs of comfort were few and far between so they opted for wholesale distortion of the findings to suit their purposes, steadfastly refusing to accept any shred of responsibility for the policy errors that were the overwhelming contributing factors to our current economic and baking woes.

Let me take the example of the Honohan view of the 2008 bank guarantee. Ministers have tried to claim he endorsed the type of guarantee given on 30 September 2008 and that he had rejected the Labour Party's policy position. He did no such thing. He endorsed the idea of - to use his phrase - an extensive guarantee that would cover deposits and future senior bonds. He most certainly did not endorse - and specifically says so at several points in the report - the type of blanket guarantee that was the key element of the Government decision that night.

Our objection was always to the notion of a blanket guarantee. We never had any objection to an extensive guarantee of deposits. I wrote to the Minister for Finance and issued a statement a week or so prior to the guarantee urging that deposits would be guaranteed. We baulked at the scale of the Government guarantee proposal and nothing in Mr. Honohan's report last week disputes the wisdom of our approach.

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