Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

When it became clear that Fianna Fáil wanted to introduce a blanket guarantee, we voted against it. The Minister of State is not stupid and knows this. The fact that he continues to allow people to think we supported the bank guarantee is testament to the type of politics in which he involves himself.

It is important that the Government examine the issue of monetary financing. The ECB has set precedents over and over again in this regard. When a crisis occurs and the euro is on the edge of the cliff, that crisis becomes the catalyst for change. The idea of emergency liquidity remaining in place for 12 to 14 years is tantamount to monetary financing. The buying of bonds on the secondary market is a form of monetary financing. On each occasion the ECB has stretched the parameters of what is understood to constitute monetary financing. When Italy and Spain found themselves on the precipice, the ECB created a system to facilitate the separation of sovereign and banking debt.

That is proof, if proof were needed, that if the Government had gone in with objectives, red lines and concession levels below which it would not go, and if it had used the leverage of walking away from the debt, a crisis would have occurred which would have been the catalyst for change.

Sinn Féin has a great deal of experience with regard to negotiation. The Good Friday Agreement and the St. Andrews Agreement were situations where the Irish Government and the British Government on all occasions tried to lower expectations of what could be achieved. That is the nature of meaningful negotiations. We asked the Irish Government to look for repeal of the Government of Ireland Act. The Irish Government said that would not happen, and that the British would never accede to such a request. We went to Tony Blair and demanded the repeal of the Government of Ireland Act, which was the basis for partition, and we achieved that.

See this speech in context