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

That is the long and the short of it. I have studied the technical details on the Department's website. We need much more detail. I hope it is forthcoming. When one examines the core issue, one has to ask whether we have actually made progress on the initiative that was secured at the Eurogroup meeting on 29 June 2012. The initiative in question was forced upon European leaders as a result of the position that Spain adopted. The position the Eurogroup took was to commit to the separation of banking and sovereign debt. We need to ask how we separated sovereign and banking debt last week. How did we do that? What is our banking debt? People are familiar with the €64 billion figure, more than half of which - €34 billion - was IBRC's debt.

How did we separate our banking debt from sovereign debt? The answer is we did not separate them. The answer is that, instead of a promissory note where there is possibly some flexibility, what this Government decided to do was to issue sovereign bonds, which means it truly wedded this State to this debt into the future.

We were supposed to commend the Government on 29 June for its securing of this deal despite the fact it was Spain that put it on the table. I remember debating with the Ministers at the time. I told them they had an open goal but they had to get the ball across the line and into the back of the net. What the Government decided to do is to take the ball and run the other way.

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