Peter Mathews (Dublin South, Fine Gael)

I thank the Technical Group and Sinn Féin for their generosity in affording me four minutes to speak. On Monday and Tuesday, we had our budget speeches. That budget was constrained by the troika agreement we signed up to at the end of November last year. Even though the moment has passed, the opportunity is still there to underscore for the benefit of our EU partners, both in and outside the eurozone, that our budget was framed under a cosh. Our Ministers did the best they could, but the cosh was not identified. We now have an imperative to encourage our Taoiseach, at his business dinner tonight and the meeting tomorrow, to say verbally and in letters writ large that our economy has been saddled with at least €75 billion of debt that should not be there. We need a restructuring, a write-down or a deferment of that debt into the distance so that it does not bring unnecessary austerity on our people.

In Europe at the moment there is a crisis that is not really of fiscal origin, although that is what the newspapers tell us. It is a financially-based crisis. It goes beyond the eurozone and moves in and out of the dollar and sterling, just as it does with the euro. For almost two decades the lack of controls, governance and proper, principled financial behaviour ran riot. On the Reuters' website today, there is an article referring to the hypothecation derivative credit that is off the balance sheet and created by some of the biggest banks in the world. Because of the contraction of liquidity at the moment, six central banks met a week ago yesterday to ensure that liquidity would be provided wherever it was needed. As a result of the liquidity contraction in recent days, the hypothecation derivative business, which is highly geared and is like operating on a margin, adds to an already huge crisis.

More than two and a half years ago, Mr. Greg Pytel, an economist and mathematician based at the London School of Economics, wrote a prescient article. He said that the pyramid created in derivative credit around the world was so big is was immeasurable because it is off the balance sheet.

If the EU summit meeting today and tomorrow does not deal with providing the necessary funds, we will have a really big problem. We must ensure that the message comes from our Taoiseach, and the other 165 Members of this House, that such a decision is imperative and cannot be ignored.

Too much discussion is a bad thing. The League of Nations discussed a phoney war for years. Phoney means voices all the time. The war broke out in 1939 and three men with action plans - Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin - solved it with no advisers.

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