Mattie McGrath (Tipperary South, Independent)

The amount involved was not €85 billion. By my simple arithmetic, we will need to invest €17.5 billion of our National Pensions Reserve Fund, NPRF, in the bottomless pit that is the banks. It is a bad deal. It was negotiated by the mandarins and the Minister, not a business person. Had a business person advised them, for example, had Albert Reynolds back when he was a Deputy or someone with business ideas gone out there, our friends from Europe and the IMF would have come to us the next morning and offered us a better deal.

I welcome the Opposition's positive promise to renegotiate. The deal must be renegotiated because we can never repay it. I believe it was set up for default, either mischievously by the Government or by the Europeans. I hate the word "default". Anyone who is in business knows that, if one defaults even once, one is listed in Stubbs Gazette, one's record is damaged and one's business and credibility diminishes. We should have rejected the deal and brought back the EU and IMF, as doing so would have suited the national interest better.

I will not put local politics ahead of national politics. I never got into deals with our Ministers for Finance, but I will stand up for the basic rights of ordinary people who cannot understand what is occurring and were appalled by events in the Oireachtas last week when the Government put party interests ahead of the public interest. This can never be allowed in politics and the public will deal with it at the ballot box. It was a fundamentally flawed miscalculation. I wish the retiring Taoiseach and Ministers the best, but they misread the situation and brought rancour from all over the world down on top of us.

Although I am proud to represent my constituents, I am not speaking for them now. I do not see the wisdom in rushing the Finance Bill through the Dáil. Last year, it took us until April to pass it. While we should not continue until next April, we should continue until next week to discuss the Bill properly paragraph by paragraph. It is a large document. In recent weeks, we have all been treating it like a Bible and saying it needed to be passed, yet issues have now arisen. I could not believe it when we adjourned at 8.30 p.m. last night. I was looking for speaking time and I thank the Chief Whip, Deputy Curran, and his staff for affording me some. However, I could not believe that we did not sit until midnight or whatever to have some discussion-----

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