Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Independent)

I commend Deputy Peter Mathews on his stand in the House today. As Deputy Mathews pointed out, the total cost of the banking losses which the Irish people are being forced to pay is €100 billion. That is €72,000 of other people's debt for every single household in Ireland. The reward for bailing out European financial institutions is cuts, taxes and, most importantly, the real loss of our independence as a sovereign nation. Deputy Mathews' call to share the costs of bailing out the European financial institutions with Europe is morally, politically and economically correct.

The Taoiseach said emphatically in the House today that Ireland would pay its debts. Here is the point - they are not our debts. Half of the debt is ours, and we should pay that. Half of the debt belongs to the private sector. There is absolutely no moral reason for us to pay this. If a man and a woman drove themselves and their family into bankruptcy not just by paying their own mortgage but by paying the mortgage of their neighbours, they would be considered fools at best and insane at worst. Yet, that is exactly what we are doing. Paying of this debt will drive us into a national insolvency that the Government claims it is trying to avoid. Earlier this week, President Obama spoke of the spirit of the Irish. He spoke of our history of fighting for what is right and of fighting foreign powers. I implore the Government to remember this and take that fighting spirit back to Europe.

The Bill contains many good ideas and I hope it will protect existing jobs and help to stimulate new jobs, yet I cannot support it. Why? It is because we have no idea what the benefits and costs of the proposed Bill are likely to be. We know that the Bill will take nearly €2 billion out of the pensions of private sector workers. How many people will stop investing in their pensions? We do not know. How many people will move their deposits out of Irish banks? We do not know. We know that the Bill will protect Irish jobs and stimulate new jobs but how many jobs will it protect? We do not know. How many jobs will it help to create? We do not know. How much of people's private pensions will be required to pay for each new job? We do not know. How many tourists will it bring to our shores? We do not know. If the management team of a company made investment decisions like this, that company would be bankrupt very quickly.

The Cabinet of the previous Government acted in this way. It made critical decisions without bringing the assessments of those decisions to this House for review. As a result, we are bankrupt and we have lost our independence as a sovereign nation. Is it the intention of the Cabinet of the new Government to continue acting in this way? I sincerely hope not. This House is constitutionally bound to hold the Cabinet to account - that is our role. However, we can only perform this role if we know the projected costs and benefits of the legislation which the Cabinet is asking us to support. Without this information, the Members of the House should reject the Bill, not because there are bad ideas in it but because we simply do not have the information required to evaluate whether the Bill represents value for money for the Irish people.

Of course, it is likely that the Bill will be passed. It is assumed that every Fine Gael and Labour Party Deputy will vote for it, even though they have not been given the information required to make that decision. The implications of the Bill are wide. Taking €2 billion out of private sector pensions could have profoundly negative implications for our society for years to come. In this context, I oppose the Bill and ask my fellow Deputies in the Labour Party and Fine Gael to oppose it also, not because they are bad ideas but because we do not yet have enough information to know if those ideas are good enough.

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