Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

This is what he had to say as distinct to what Ministers pretend he said:

The inclusion of existing long-term bonds and some subordinated debt was not necessary in order to protect the immediate liquidity position. These investments were in effect locked in. Their inclusion complicated eventual loss allocation and resolution options.

We should think even for a moment about those simple sentences. They do not sound to me like any kind of support for the guarantee of the Minister, Deputy Lenihan, and the Taoiseach. Quite the reverse in fact, it reads as though it is written by someone with grave doubts about the wisdom of a blanket guarantee which had two failed institutions, Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Nationwide, at its core, not the high street banks we needed for ordinary deposits and business. A statement that recognizes the need to do something extensive to stabilize the banks cannot be read as tacit agreement with what was actually done, a blanket guarantee that went far beyond what was wise and prudent, and which will probably end up costing this country at least €20 billion to €35 billion more than a more limited kind of guarantee of deposits would have involved.

Ministers and spin-doctors refuse, understandably, to read nuanced comments. They deliberately confuse the words "extensive" and "blanket". Like in Alice in Wonderland, words mean what they choose to make them mean. The truth is that the guarantee of the existing bonds and the subordinated bonds was a critical and expensive error that will haunt taxpayers for a generation. Fianna Fáil Ministers are understandably fond - I share much of it - of commending the National Treasury Management Agency and, in particular, its senior management, and allocates a lot of different responsibilities to it which the agency has taken on and handled in a way that is admirable.

Mr. Michael Somers, who was head of the NTMA for all of the years since its inception until recently and was chief executive at the time of the guarantee recently said:

As an independent observer, I was aghast at what was happening and feeling what a shame, all this effort that we had made at making the country solvent blown like that. It's incredible and it's going to affect us for several generations.

That is what the Government's favourite person in the NTMA whom the Government has quoted again and again has to say about the guarantee.

I want to discuss tax breaks. Mr. Regling and Mr. Watson ranked property breaks as one of the main ingredients of the home made triggers of the collapse. This has been my song for so long that it was a pleasant surprise to hear it sung with so much gusto by others. According to Mr. Regling Irish property tax incentives were three times the scale of similar breaks elsewhere in the eurozone and that by 2005 the cost of these breaks was larger than the remaining income tax receipts. That is how big they were.

The Taoiseach has tried to present a misleading picture of himself as the great reformer who abolished them. As both reports show, the Taoiseach, who was the former Minister for Finance, extended the tax breaks. He had headline abolition of the tax shelters, tempered by small print expansion, from 2005-08. Both reports suggest that it was at this point that the tax breaks ended up costing the Irish taxpayer such a colossal amount.

The Taoiseach was reckless and cowardly in the face of mounting evidence of tax avoidance and the excessive bank lending in one sector. Indecon and the Department of Finance officials pointed this out in various reports. He had the evidence before him on his desk. He procrastinated. He caused immense damage and in the end he caused a huge transfer of wealth from the ordinary, average working Irish person to the super rich. Time and again in this House I exposed the issue of the millionaires who were paying no tax because of the Fianna Fáil tax breaks. The Taoiseach stands condemned out of his own mouth by the very faulty self-defence which he tried to put forward.

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