Charlie McConalogue (Donegal North East, Fianna Fail)

It won, indeed, and it was a well-fought campaign and an important decision for the country.

I return to the point I made about the appetite among the public for reform at the time of the general election. The two parties in Government created that hunger with the platform they put forward in promising reform if elected to government. However, what has been achieved so far has been a grave disappointment. We had many policy mistakes in the past and our political system failed to signpost some of the challenges that would come down the road. It certainly failed in pinpointing a growing problem in the banking sector, which is a large part of the issue we need to address now. In the past our political system failed in how we dealt with our planning systems. The Mahon and Moriarty tribunals represent two very costly examples of how planning was mishandled in the past and how it corrupted the political system owing to a lack of regulation and a lack of clear guidelines.

When the Minister came into office, the Moriarty and Mahon tribunals were nearing completion and independent investigations had been set up into the local authorities by the former Minister, Mr. John Gormley, as outlined in tonight's motion. Instead of taking an approach of transparency, trying to reform the system and ensuring nothing was left covered up, the Minister's first action, unfortunately, was to close down those independent investigations that had been initiated.

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