Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

One of the problems we have as a country is that this incremental additional cost for Anglo Irish Bank, the drip-feed of information and the message that the Government does not know. Is the message going out to the markets that the head of the Government does not know the bottom line for Anglo Irish Bank and does not yet know a figure that will be announced tomorrow? In that situation he will be in here at 11.55 p.m., before the guarantee expires, to ask for an extension without knowing one of the most critical pieces of information that the taxpayer, the public and, I would have thought, the Taoiseach needed to know before he decided to come in here and put a proposal to the Dáil that it be extended. That is not credible.

We have an economic difficulty in terms of the perception of this country internationally, the lack of confidence that, unfortunately, this country has been experiencing in recent times and the way in which that is reflected in terms of the cost——

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