Shane Ross (Dublin South, Independent)

I agree with the Taoiseach on one point. Plenty of clarity and certainty has been introduced. The clarity and certainty is that the Government has utterly surrendered to the IMF and EU. They know that, we know that and everybody knows that. "Default" is, apparently, the word that cannot be mentioned in this Chamber.

Is the Taoiseach happy that the greatest cheerleaders for his policy and for the statements coming from his side of the House are Fianna Fáil? His support is coming from the previous Government. Very few people can see the difference, if there is any, between this Government and the previous one in their attitudes to the banks, despite all the those promises. That is the great disappointment for those of us who have been observing this for a long time.

The Taoiseach cannot paint the opposition to Government policies as something coming from the technical group and Sinn Féin. Does the Taoiseach read the Lex column in the Financial Times? It will tell him that people out in the market think Ireland is being governed by people who do not understand markets. Let me read four lines from the Lex column of last Saturday:

In the Irish case senior bondholders have been given a blank cheque by Irish taxpayers, the result of an Irish Government decision in late 2008. No other Government is likely to make that mistake.

Another Government has made that mistake. The Taoiseach's Government has done so, by wearing the clothes of the Government of Brian Cowen. Why do senior bondholders have to be treated in the same way as deposit holders? They are a completely different creature. Senior bondholders make a decision, take a risk and make an investment. Depositors take their money to a bank with no sophisticated investment techniques or knowledge and put their money in the bank to be safeguarded. There is an issue of trust against an issue of investment.

There is no sense of our coming out of this. I am, by nature, an optimist. I believe we can find our way out of difficulty. My party has put forward suggestions for how to do that. However, it will not be by Yet we are saying we rank them pari passuand they should never be stung. The logic of this is that the Irish taxpayer must pay for the senior bondholders. The article in Lex column, which is a market-led column, states that senior bondholders are the luckiest people in Europe and that they cannot believe their luck at the current Irish Government pursuing identical policies to those of the last Government in terms of insisting on paying them when no other Government in the world would do so.

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