Michael McGrath (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail)

-----about the scale of the problem and the scale of the losses. There is no question about that. That is accepted.

With the benefit of hindsight, there have been a number of official reports which have examined the guarantee, including the Honohan report, the Regling Watson report and the Nyberg report. Even with that full benefit of hindsight, none of them and no political party in this House has come up with a credible alternative that was open to the Government on that night. That is not what I wanted to speak about but I had to respond to what the Minister said.

Sinn Féin has raised some important issues. On the promissory note, it must be pointed out that it was put in place at a time when there was no European fund available for any Government in the eurozone to recapitalise its banks. The real issue here is how the promissory note, capital and interest repayments, will be funded. Whatever losses are in Anglo Irish Bank will be dealt with over a period of time and the estimate of the final loss in that bank has come down from between €29 billion and €34 billion to €25 billion. The payment of the promissory note and the interest are going into that bank and whatever is left ultimately will come back to the State. The real issue, which is touched on in the motion, is: how does one fund those payments? That is the option that is now open to the Government using the new facility in the European Union, the EFSF, to secure a proper funding arrangement to have that promissory note refunded and redesigned so that we can get a better deal in that sense.

There are other issues I want to touch on briefly. It is sometimes forgotten that those who suffered most in terms of the banking collapse were the ordinary shareholders in the banks who lost approximately €60 billion since 2008. We all know many of those shareholders. There were many institutional investors but many ordinary investors who put their entire lifesavings into banks that they thought were absolutely secure and were assured were absolutely secure by the authorities and by the banks, have lost everything. That is one of the real scandals which transpired in the banking crisis. Some €15 billion of subordinated bondholder losses have been imposed.

Lest it be forgotten, the previous Government put the issue of imposing losses on senior bondholders on the table in November last when the programme of assistance was being negotiated with the EU and the IMF, and it was flatly rejected by the ECB at that time. The ECB has remained utterly consistent and it is still not entertaining any suggestion by the Government, despite all the hysteria we heard.

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