Peter Mathews (Dublin South, Fine Gael)

After the week that was in it our challenge is to encourage one another. We were encouraged by our visitors and responded with warmth and welcome.

Second Stage of this Finance Bill is one part of the jigsaw of reconstruction. In this country we are finding our voice. We are at the Sexton half-time stage, a rallying call, but let us base it on realism and start with the real picture. This Finance Bill is one part of the jigsaw from which we must build. However, the picture is stark. I say as much and will not pull my punches or lower my voice. Our country is getting out of a mess of €100 billion of bank losses that have smothered and buried the households and people of this country. It behoves us to face up to the people who have provided interim financing, on shaky grounds, for the balance sheets of our banks that need structural repair. We are getting to that repair slowly but we need to focus our story on the people who provided the banks with that €100 billion, all mixed up in the funding which came from the ECB and our Central Bank. Our European partners have to understand our story. They have been bewildered by a long saga of confusion for the past two and a half years and are only beginning to see the picture out of the fog.

Reference was made by various contributors to the younger people who are emigrating. I commend everybody's contribution today. I made notes on every one and I acknowledge all that has been said. However, we must explain clearly that the story which was told for the past two years was unreliable. We must say to ourselves that although it is a tragedy that young people are emigrating at present, still they escape to some degree because they are not smothered in debt. It is the families, households and businesses which are struggling that are smothered by debt. They are that way because the banks are smothered in debt as a result of the huge losses they made.

The challenge, therefore, is to continue to request of our banks' creditors at the ECB and of the remaining outstanding bondholders for a write down of that debt. I suggest that of the figure of €50 billion in amounts owed to the ECB the majority of those loans had a provenance in or derived from funding the repayment and redemption in full of the senior bondholders to last year. The figure of €50 billion might be the starting point for a write down of the amounts owed to the ECB, with €25 billion for the amounts outstanding to senior bondholders of our Irish-owned banks. This amount of write-down could, in turn, be cascaded back to businesses and households in Ireland, relieving them of debt.

See this speech in context