Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Independent)

I acknowledge that the Government inherited this problem but the key issue is finding a way to deal with it. Unfortunately, all I see today is more of the same. We have been told by several Ministers that the country is in receivership but if that is the case we should restructure what we pay out of the public purse. It is immoral that the public should be asked to put another €24 billion into banks that have clearly failed. When added to the €46 billion already put into the banks, the figure comes to €70 billion but that is not even the bottom line because we will be dealing with Irish Nationwide Building Society in May.

This is the fifth time we have been given a figure but the question is not whether this is the final one but why should the taxpayers carry this liability at all. We have been told that allowing banks to fail would be catastrophic, even though banks fail all the time. The shocks were felt around the world when Lehman Brothers failed but the American economy is recovering. We are bailing out the banks at the expense of rebuilding our economy.

The Minister used nice, soft words when he told us a capital injection would be needed. The banks are to be reduced in size, which means the money will not be repaid. It was obvious, even from outside, that we were having a plain vanilla property boom but the German and French banks continued to pour out the money that fuelled it. The only reference to burden sharing in the Minister's statement was on subordinated debt. That is completely unacceptable. We are constantly being told about our EU partners but it does not feel like a partnership. Not only are we paying back the debt that banks offered in the full knowledge that investments fall as well as rise but we are also being criticised for complaining about it.

If 29 September 2008 was a black day, today will be another black day if we insist on pumping a further €24 billion of taxpayers' money into these banks. I join the previous speaker in appealing to the Taoiseach to stop this recipe for this disaster.

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