Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

I move amendment No. 2:

In page 9, between lines 11 and 12, to insert the following:

"PART 1

Publication of Certain Bonuses

1.—Each credit institution that is participating in the eligible liabilities guarantee scheme shall be required, within 30 days of the passing of this Act, to submit to

Dáil Éireann details of the names of all of its officers, employees or contractors to whom bonuses have been paid between 30 September 2008 and the date of passing of this Act, and the amount of the bonuses in each case.".

Amendment No. 2 seeks to require the Government to publish within a month of the Finance Bill being passed information about the bonuses earned by bankers. i do not know whether Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot have been used by the Department of Finance, but there has been the strange case of the missing information about the bonuses paid to bank staff since the bank guarantee. I and other Deputies have asked the Minister for Finance over the last year whether he would come clean and find out from the institutions bailed out by the taxpayer the level of bonuses they paid to staff in each year since the guarantee, that is, since September 2008.

Unfortunately, it has been extremely difficult to extract this information. Banks are very anxious to tell us about their wonderful contributions to this, that and the other but they are extremely diffident and shy. They are somewhat akin to the lesser spotted something or other. One would have to go deep into the undergrowth to figure out what bonuses, exactly, are paid by banks. What we know, after a good deal of parliamentary questioning, is that in the period since the guarantee, the banks, other than Bank of Ireland, have paid about €40 million in bonuses and next month I understand AIB has another €30 million to €40 million in bonuses to pay which it says it has committed to. We know that Anglo Irish Bank has paid €21 million in bonuses since the guarantee.

The bonus culture destroyed the banks. It turned bankers not into people who managed relationships for customers, particularly small to medium-sized businesses, but into bonus earners. If they sold products, regardless of how risky, they got very fine fat fees and many of them ended up earning incomes of several million because of the bonus culture. This undoubtedly made many of the people at the top in the banks reckless in the extreme. They gave crazy loans for projects that would never happen. They gave loans for developments of massive quantities of housing and industrial development in areas where, even in a century from now, there would not be a sufficiently high population numbers to support those levels of development. It is the considered view of the Labour Party, which I believe is shared by many of our social democratic colleagues in Europe and elsewhere, that bankers need to have some disciplinary framework imposed on them. We need to call a halt to the bonus culture and the reckless decision making that it gave rise to.

What we want to know, to start off with, is whatever happened to these Bank of Ireland bonuses. When I got the answer to my parliamentary questions there was a little asterisk and a blank line where the Bank of Ireland data should have been to say that the information was not available. I thought that they had reclassified bonuses, and perhaps that is what they sought to do. The institutions bailed out by the State have an obligation to put what they paid in bonuses into the public domain for the information of taxpayers. The point I made about Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot was that the Minister recently confessed to me that a high level, urgent investigation is taking place in the Department of Finance into the Bank of Ireland bonus figures. I am not sure who is Miss Marple and who is Hercule Poirot in the Department of Finance but this particular amendment, if passed, will require our sleuths in the Department of Finance, one month after the passing of the Finance Bill, to publish information about all bonuses paid since the guarantee by the banks and institutions the taxpayer bailed out. This is a reasonable requirement in a modern democracy where we are trying to come to terms with the economic disaster that has overtaken us because of mismanagement by Fianna Fáil. As Fianna Fáil leaves office and possibly goes out of government, it is incumbent on the party in the last days of that Administration to publish this information. It is very difficult for this country to move on from the banking disaster unless we have a full telling of who did what and, in respect of bonuses, who got what.

We are not talking about small bonuses for staff in call centres and banks. Such people may be on the minimum wage which is increased slightly by the payment of bonuses. This is not what we are talking about. I refer to the people at the top of the banks, who were making millions of euro per annum. At one stage, the former chief executive of Bank of Ireland told a shocked Irish public that his income had fallen to below €2 million a year because of the cuts he had taken. He clearly felt sorry for himself and that he had made a major national sacrifice. Publishing this information is part of giving a sense of control to our citizens so that there is some level of accountability required and demanded of the banking institutions that are costing us so much and will cost us so much to bail out. I commend the Labour Party amendment to the House.

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