Joe McHugh (Donegal North East, Fine Gael)

On 3 July 2009, the Taoiseach said in this House that "nobody predicted what has happened globally or in Ireland". The two preliminary reports into the banking crisis, which were presented to the Oireachtas earlier this month, suggest that the Government's economic policies were a major cause of the crisis.

The Government's draft terms of reference for the investigation are designed to protect the Government from being held publicly accountable. That is why Fine Gael, through this motion, wants to change these terms of reference. We find that the Taoiseach's defence is unsustainable. His only defence has been that these policies were based on the best available official advice at the time. However, this argument has not been tested at length by either report.

On 3 July 2009, the Taoiseach said: "[N]obody predicted what has happened globally or in Ireland." That argument is negated by the fact that among those who warned of the risks of the Government's policies were Fine Gael - Deputies Kenny and Bruton warned time and again that the construction bubble was not sustainable - Professor Patrick Honohan, John FitzGerald and the ESRI, the National Competitiveness Council, the IMF, the OECD, The Economist, and, most importantly, the ordinary man in the street. Ordinary people had been predicting the bursting of the property bubble for more than a decade, and the Government, which has been in power for so long, had a responsibility to listen to these people.

Irish people are educated today. There was a time when a politician's job was to form his or her own independent view; that time is gone. Our job as parliamentarians in this democracy - messengers of the people - is to listen to our constituents and use their views to inform our political decisions and choices. I challenge any politician who served in an Irish constituency between 2002 and 2007 to stand up in the House and say that the man in the street did not warn that the bubble was unsustainable.

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