Alan Shatter (Dublin South, Fine Gael)

It is right that we consider why we need this motion. For too long there has been an attitude of "anything goes" in our politics and economy. We have seen a shocking disregard for the truth by bankers, developers and the Government. At the heart of our financial, economic, and sovereignty crisis has been a crisis of truthfulness. This deficit of truth has had a disastrous consequence for our country. Telling the truth is a critical requirement of a properly functioning economy and of properly functioning politics.

At the heart of Government there has been a moral void - a black hole lacking any moral compass. This was recently graphically depicted by the Minister for Justice and Law Reform, Deputy Dermot Ahern, first proposing a charge on cash withdrawals from ATM machines and then denying in this House that he had said anything of the sort. Unfortunately for him, it was all caught out on YouTube.

We must squarely face the ugly reality that under Fianna Fáil's and the Green Party's watch, there has been a succession of disastrous banking scandals and failures, scandals relating to State agencies such as FÁS and the Health Service Executive, reckless lending, a home mortgage crisis and a fiscal meltdown. These scandals have happened under the watch of Fianna Fáil-led Governments that have shown an almost sociopathic disregard for the truth.

For almost 14 years Fianna Fáil-led Governments have acted as the political wing of unprincipled self-serving bankers and avaricious developers. The former Taoiseach, Deputy Bertie Ahern, led the troops in the charge and the former Minister for Finance, now Taoiseach, Deputy Cowen, was his financially illiterate sidekick for more than five years. Many remember the tawdry days of these dons of incompetence in their Galway tent, a tent that had all the dangerous allure for business people of a Don Vito Corleone wedding marquee. Their distinctive contribution to this Republic was to openly elevate greed in an emporium of reckless financial gambling to a plane where it was the only value in sight in our exploited, betrayed, Republic.

We have tabled this motion because this feckless Government, which has become a byword for unprincipled politics, incompetency, and financial illiteracy, cannot be trusted. Their noses were so deep into the trough that it was too late before they realised that they were leading the country in a nose-dive to economic meltdown and financial ruin. They have breached the principle of government as trust. Their incompetence has created a debt of up to €50 billion to bail out the banks and an additional debt of €100 billion to date from excessive public expenditure and left decent citizens abandoned and betrayed. We tabled this motion because this Government cannot be trusted to police the delinquent bankers and builders who were its gilt-edged clientele.

Our country needs a new attitude of responsibility and a Government it can trust. This has been explained repeatedly by Deputy Kenny, the leader of Fine Gael, with the principled consistency of a leader who puts personal integrity and responsibility first. We must do the hard work of entrenching a new attitude of responsibility, accountability and more than anything else, a new political morality. There are specific steps we must take. Those who criminally exploited Fianna Fáil's era of light-touch regulation to do financial wrong as a highroad to wealth must be punished. Those who fabricated accounts or who carried out off-the-books or fictitious transactions to misrepresent the true financial position of financial institutions in order to lure others into detrimental deals, should realise that they have written their own tickets to a prison cell.

It is true that the Government has put a pious emphasis on making wrongdoers answerable before the criminal courts. Since 2008, when the corpse of the collapsed Anglo Irish Bank had barely cooled, the Minister for Finance, Deputy Brian Lenihan, solemnly pledged to make gangster bankers answerable. There have been no prosecutions to publicly vindicate the fundamental importance of truthfulness in the marketplace. Let us make no bones about it; public trust in the Government to make bankers answerable for their wrongs has collapsed. Any true commitment to the rule of law demands that we confirm that the powerful are not above the law and that where appropriate criminal prosecutions are initiated expeditiously. Few in this State believe that those truly responsible for our banking disaster will be brought to justice. This Parliament, this Dáil, must do all it can to prove them wrong and to ensure any obstacles to justice taking its course constructed by Government are dismantled.

The Garda Commissioner's recent statement in Templemore Garda college indicates that he is aware that there is a growing public mood for the two-year investigation to yield results soon. He warned, however, that investigating fraud is a complex and time-consuming exercise. He is right. He reported that approximately 150,000 e-mails and other communications are being examined, that up to 400 witnesses have been interviewed, and that some witnesses have given statements of up to 150 pages long. While that is reassuring it is not the point nor is it enough. I have no doubt the Garda is doing Trojan work.

Speaking also in Templemore, the Minister for Justice and Law Reform, Deputy Dermot Ahern, dishonestly presented himself as some sort of detached commentator with no responsibility for bad decisions made by the Government of which he is a part. He said "nobody is more annoyed" than Cabinet Ministers over past banking practices. He stated: "Unfortunately, outrage and anger is no good in a book of evidence. What you have to get is hard evidence." On the issue of the investigation concluding, he said "the sooner the better", but that it is entirely a matter for the appropriate prosecution authorities. One would think that the Minister was inhabiting the planet Zog at the time when Government supported light-touch regulation and not sitting in Cabinet and bound by collective Cabinet responsibility for the banking disaster, some of the unnecessary expenditure incurred in trying to prop up banks and excessive general public expenditure which is at the root and core of the destruction of the economy.

The same Minister should have, but failed to put in place a distinctive, adequately resourced, cohesive, inter-agency unit with a mission to complete the banking investigation expeditiously. Not only that, but he has failed to clarify the ambit of the investigation. Some 150,000 e-mails and witnesses' statements of up to 150 pages is a long paper trail. Any vigilant observer must ask, as I do, whether the paper trail stretches from the head office of Anglo Irish Bank to desks in the Department of Finance or into any other Department? One must also ask whether the paper trail stretches from the head office of Anglo Irish Bank to any former Financial Regulator or Governor of the Central Bank. One must further ask whether the paper trail stretches from the desks of the various banks and banking regulators to the desks of the present or previous Taoiseach or any Minister in government.

Those questions are important. It is probable that key bankers will offer the defence that any questionable actions they performed were beforehand notified to a regulator, Department or member of Cabinet and were either expressly approved or given the sort of nod or wink for which Fianna Fáil is famous or rather infamous. The incompetence and deceitfulness of successive Fianna Fáil-led Governments was abetted by inept regulation. Regulators allowed banks and building societies to lend billions of euro in the face of inadequate collateral without uttering a whimper. Regulators failed to spot or ignored sharp practices. Both this and the previous Government, deliberately led regulators to believe that maladministration and looking the other way was the acceptable norm. The failures of regulation were not accidents. They were the outcome of the light touch regulation obsession that gripped the Government's Galway tent mindset. Successive Fianna Fáil-led Governments actively fostered regulatory failure.

So we must ask these questions. Have investigators questioned Deputy Bertie Ahern as a former Taoiseach? Have they questioned the current Taoiseach, Deputy Cowen, regarding his role as Minister for Finance? Have they interviewed senior civil servants in the Department of Finance? Have they been able to ascertain the exact state of these people's knowledge of some of the exotic banking and share transactions undertaken that are now subject to investigation?

The job of Government is to serve the public interest, but it is still failing to do so. Take a simple example of necessary reform. We urgently need new legislation to govern the mortgage market. I will mention three specific reforms. First, borrowers must be protected from bankers, developers and estate agents who conspire to inflate property prices and to provide excessive mortgage funding for which there is no adequate security. Second, all brokers or lenders must be required to verify a borrower's reasonable ability to service and discharge a mortgage obtained within the timeframe stipulated. Third, the law must say that mortgage brokers have a fiduciary relationship with the borrower and an obligation to act in the borrower's best interest and in good faith.

The Minister for Justice and Law Reform has made an art of entering the House happy to blame others for the Government's incompetence and failings. Tonight, he should answer the questions asked. He should tell the House whether the Garda or representatives of the Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement have interviewed members of the Government and senior civil servants during the course of their two years of investigation, whether all relevant files and papers from the Taoiseach's office and the Department of Finance have been furnished to the Garda, the extent to which the former Financial Regulator and the former Governor of the Central Bank have co-operated with the investigation and whether full co-operation has been received from current and former employees of Anglo Irish Bank and from former board members of that bank, as it is now a State institution. The Government should publish a draft constitutional amendment to give our Parliament inquisitorial committee powers that are effective and fair so that we can hold people who abuse the financial markets or misuse public funds accountable.

The elemental dishonesty of this financially illiterate Government in respect of the economy is yet again illustrated tonight in the amendment it is proposing to Fine Gael's motion. Despite all we now know and all the reports published in the past 18 months, it is still so delusional as to claim that all of our economic and banking woes result from "the worst global financial crisis in more than 75 years". The Taoiseach and his Ministers occupy a parallel fictitious world in which they cannot even acknowledge that their own appointee to Governor of the Central Bank, Professor Patrick Honohan, a well respected individual, has stated that this crisis is essentially home grown. The public rightly are no longer willing to tolerate the Government fabricating the facts and covering up its disastrous failures.

The elemental incompetence of this Government and that of its predecessor is evidenced by their monumental waste of taxpayers' hard-earned money, the extent to which the former has mortgaged the future of this and future generations and its complete failure to stimulate growth. My political colleagues, including Deputies Noonan, Bruton and Varadkar, have needed to remind the Government repeatedly that taxation and cutbacks will not resuscitate the economy and create or save jobs. No Government has done as much in the history of this benighted Republic to undermine the institutions of this State in the minds of an understandably aggrieved public.

No one should be fooled by the Government's ducking and weaving and its pathetic attempts to deny responsibility yet again this evening for the catastrophe economic failures with which we are all confronted. A succession of Fianna Fáil-led Governments have ruled over not the free market, but the greed market. People outside the House should demand an election and no longer tolerate the sad spectacle of a Government desperately holding onto office by its fingertips, holding onto its cherished Mercs and perks and long past its sell-by date. To the Independents in the House who continue to support the Government, I say have the courage and the sense of public duty to vote it out. It no longer has the people's support. If Independents had any sense of public duty, they would no longer maintain this Government in office. Indeed, if the Green Party retained any vestige of pride or moral compass and was not so fearful of being held to account by the people, it would also in the public interest end the life of this discredited Government. It is time that the electorate was afforded an opportunity to elect to Government Fine Gael politicians who can be trusted and who will restore international and domestic confidence in the institutions of this State.

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