Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail)

-----was, as per Professor Honohan's report, that it either maintained a banking system or it allowed it to collapse. I believe the guarantee should be examined and I have no difficulty with such an examination. The Committee of Public Accounts should be allowed get on with its work in this regard, having already put in six months of significant work on the issues around the bank guarantee, the collapse of the banks and the banking crisis not just here but across the world. This is the worst banking crisis since the late 1920s. It has been unprecedented. What faced the Government the last time was unprecedented as well. The Taoiseach knows that in all sincerity. Putting the politics to one side, those are the issues. We need to find out, first, why the banks collapsed and, second, the policy response to that collapse which was the bank guarantee.

There is growing concern in the House that one of the most effective committees we have had for many a year and which has cross-party support, namely, the Committee of Public Accounts, is being nobbled and undermined progressively by the Government. The most recent manifestation of this is Ministers questioning its capacity to investigate the issues around the banking crisis and bank guarantee. Will the Taoiseach assure the House that we will not witness an unacceptable undermining of the status of the Committee of Public Accounts? Many other committees should be like it in terms of its cross-party consensus and capacity to deal with issues, as it did before.

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