Joe Costello (Dublin Central, Labour)

Nearly one week later, the enormity of the bank bailout is staggering. Thursday certainly was a black day and it will be recognised in the future as black Thursday. That Anglo Irish Bank could require a bailout of between €29.4 billion and €34.4 billion boggles the mind. We seem to think only in billions now with regard to bailout and recapitalisation whereas in the past, figures had a real value. These figures now are multiples of billions. The total is close to €50 billion or may be more than this when it bottoms out, when we have a final figure for AIB, Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Nationwide Building Society. When this is combined with the annual deficit for this year of in the region of €80 billion, less tax take over expenditure, we are looking at an appalling vista.

This vista is facing every man, woman and child in this country. It was created by the greed, deception, fraud, lies, the corporate crime of the bankers, the financiers and by the lack of regulation, supervision or monitoring by those who should have been in charge. At the top is the Government which allowed light touch regulation or no regulation to continue over an extended period. Nobody called halt. The Minister of State's Government has been in power for the past 13 years yet it never cried for a slowdown. The mantra was a soft landing. There not could possibly have been a worse landing. There is no landing, it is a bottomless pit we have sunk into and we are not sure we have reached the bottom yet.

The ordinary people of Ireland question how nobody has been brought to justice or charged with an offence. This has been a colossal robbery of money from the people. Nobody has been arrested, not to talk about charged or convicted. This is one of the big scandals of this situation. It is bad enough to have all that money gone but nobody has been held responsible or accountable before the law. To the ordinary person it seems there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. People are angry and disgusted with this and it goes against people's innate sense of fairness. They feel frustration and helplessness and the Government does not realise this. Someone 100,000 people emigrated in the past two years and the USI stated that 100,000 qualified students are on the dole. The number of people on the live register has increased to 450,000 people. This is the human face of the bank bailout, the bank guarantee and the disastrous way financial institutions and the political masters handled the economy over recent years. We are facing this bleak future and the Minister for Finance has got it wrong from the first day. This was supposed to be the cheapest bailout in the world, in the exact words of the Minister, and at every stage there was to be a return. NAMA was to make a profit but that would be hard to see. We were supposed to get our money back but there is no question of getting our money back. More and more has been poured in. The Minister and Ireland should be in the Guinness Book of Records for the largest and most expensive bank bailout in the history of the world proportionate to our population and the size of the country.

We must look to the future when responding to this. We must try to create some hope for people. We must consider the picture in the context of what has been announced. Virtually all bets are off in terms of what was promised by the Government. The national development plan was designed for 2007-13 but it is gone out the window. Its replacement in July was the infrastructural development plan for 2010-16 and that is gone out the window. It referred to investment in every Department but we have no money to invest. Where will we get the money for investment? We recently discussed metro north, a matter I am considering carefully in the current economic environment. What projects in the national development plan can be brought forward on the basis of cost-benefit analysis of their delivery, economic activity and job creation? The major transport projects in Dublin include the Citywest line, the DART interconnector, metro west, the Luas BXD, the Lucan Luas and metro north. These are multibillion euro projects. We must pick and choose to ensure that serious capital projects costing an awful lot of money provide the best return. We must review the national development plan that was launched a number of months ago.

Dublin Bus must operate with a reduced public service obligation and with 100 fewer buses. Iarnród Éireann cannot afford carriages for an hourly service between Dublin and Belfast and the Minister for Transport is threatening to abolish the €15 million public service obligation for regional airports. This would destroy business and tourism connectivity throughout the regions, a point of which the Minister of State, Deputy Dara Calleary, should be aware. Such a sum could destroy connectivity, communications and tourism from the north west to the south. This also applies to billions of euro of other capital projects.

In this context, I am disappointed with Deputy James Reilly, deputy leader of Fine Gael, who fails to realise the reality heralded by Black Thursday when he attacks the Labour Party for exercising caution in this respect. Thankfully, his party leader, Deputy Enda Kenny in a major statement on 27 February 2009 recognised, like the Labour Party, that a blank cheque cannot be written for any project in the national development plan until the value of each project has been assessed in terms of job creation and downstream economic activity. In an article in The Irish Times he stated:

We will look at which infrastructure projects can be safely deferred or abandoned. That means that some projects, like the metro projects in Dublin, would be put on the backburner. We would scrap the old National Development Plan and reprioritise smaller, labour-intensive projects that can keep as many tradesmen and builders employed as possible.

I agree entirely with that. It is the position of the Labour Party and we are at one with it. It is about time the deputy leader of Fine Gael spoke to his leader so that they sing from the same hymn sheet.

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