Pearse Doherty (Donegal South West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

We do not believe the State should pay a single cent of this debt. It should not be paid in capital and it should not be paid in interest. That is a legitimate and logical position to have. There is no doubt it was a realistic position before the Government decided to cave in last week. I say that because I believe the Government's starting point should have been to look for and secure a write-down of this odious debt. Instead, we have the time-honoured tradition of a Government trying to sell a deal as if it had no other choice, but that was not the case. There are always choices in politics. The spin from the Government when it secured the famous statement in Europe on 29 June last was that banking and sovereign debt were to be separated. That has now been jettisoned in return for perceived short-term political gain. Eight months after the Taoiseach declared a "seismic shift" in our debt position, the State is formally taking on a huge extra chunk of banking debt in the form of a sovereign bond. We all know from where this debt came. It came from corrupt practices and criminal activities in a bank that was not overseen properly by the regulator and was facilitated by successive Governments. The approach of turning this toxic banking debt into sovereign debt by issuing sovereign bonds to cover it brought us here in the first place.

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