Michael Noonan (Limerick City, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Surely nobody in this House is advocating that the banks should continue trading unprofitably and that Irish taxpayers should be asked to put more money in to keep salaries up and pensions high. That is a ridiculous proposition. Banks must cut their cloth according to their measure, but I will not dictate the specific terms of how they cut it. I have said that I want to see reductions of between 6% and 10% in the cost base. That is a fairly wide tolerance. I have said that management must negotiate with employees and include the representatives of those employees in the negotiations, before coming back to me with a proposal which achieves that level of saving. Then we will talk about it. It is not the job of the Minister to blunder into delicate negotiations seeking to lay down the arrangements. That simply does not work. The banks must be run on a commercial basis, they must be run by the management and board of directors, and they must negotiate arrangements with their employees in the normal way.

Doing nothing is not an answer. My colleague, the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Deputy Brendan Howlin, will today announce the result of the negotiations on a successor to the Croke Park agreement. We are very pleased that he has again reached a satisfactory arrangement with the unions. We are aware, however, that this will cause a great deal of pain for large numbers of civil and public servants, including teachers, nurses and gardaí. It is incredible that anybody would propose that the banks which are being kept going with taxpayers' money should not cut their cost base in order to make them commercial.

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