Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

I have never made a personal attack on the Taoiseach in this House and I am not going to start now. What I said, and what I stand over, is that if the Taoiseach's Government knew Anglo Irish Bank was insolvent and he asked the Irish taxpayers to bail it out and to pay the cost we are now paying for it, that was and is economic treason. I stand over that.

The Taoiseach responds to me with a lot of "what ifs", what if the guarantee had not been given and the bailout had not been given. Let us concentrate on what is and that is the fact the Irish people are now having to pay a very big price for that mistake. The Taoiseach tells us that if there was never a banking crisis, we would still have a fiscal problem with the public finances. If we did not have the bank crisis, if the banks and their debts were not tied to the hip of the State, as happened under the bank guarantee, we would not be in the IMF. Yes, we would have a problem with which we would have to deal but we would be capable of dealing with it. It is because we have the bank crisis that the first line of the IMF deal is the money from our savings, the National Pensions Reserve Fund, must now go into bailing out those toxic debts and toxic banks.

In the entire reply he gave, the Taoiseach did not answer the questions I asked. I asked him to clear up whether he did or did not talk about bank business at the dinner and on the golf course - it is a straightforward question - and to tell us what other contacts, if any, he had with that bank and its officers. There is perhaps a more fundamental question. We are going back over the past and the Taoiseach talked about getting to the bottom of it and wanting to tell us everything that happened about the contacts with the banks. We asked for an inquiry into this that would include the political decision making, which we are now discussing, and the Taoiseach refused.

This is a new year and we are in a terrible place with the economy. People are being forced to emigrate, pay is being cut and families are having difficulties surviving. Most families in this country are now dealing with survival of the business and the household. In a new year, people want to move things on, they want to get the country working again and to get a Government that works. They want to get back to work.

Can the Taoiseach answer this question? How long more is he going to stay in office? How long more is his Government going to stay in office? How long more is he going to hang on before he gives the country the opportunity to move on and solve at least some of the problems which he and his Government have created for us?

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