Clare Daly (Dublin North, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

I am sure the Minister appreciates how sickened people are by what are called "the vampire tapes". Does she appreciate that the questions people are asking do not really relate to who said what to whom, or to whether politicians were just incompetent or incompetent and corrupt? They are asking what the Government intends to do about it. To be honest, slagging Fianna Fáil and waffling on as the Taoiseach did here for the past two days does not really cut it.

The Minister might be interested to know that 26 members of the Czech Republic Parliament are in custody at the moment for crimes of a less serious character than what went on in Ireland five years ago. Five years ago, the banking crime of the century - the theft of billions from men, women and children in this country - took place, and nothing has been done.

The Taoiseach told us yesterday that it takes time and that we are preparing a book of evidence, the exact same line that was given two years after the crisis. It is utter nonsense. What other crime would be treated in this way? Where is the fraud squad? Where is the Criminal Assets Bureau? This is what they were set up for. Any other crime scene would have been surrounded and the evidence taken. It was six months before the Garda made a visit to Anglo Irish Bank and two years before it even got the passwords to its computers.

The reason it is different is that there is a different attitude to crimes committed by people in suits. They are not considered to be real crimes. Also, of course, there was a fear that if the Garda had gone in, a connection to the political establishment might have been revealed. Now, we are expected to believe that a newspaper whose owner this time last year took Seán Fitzpatrick to the European Championships and then quashed the printing of those photographs is at the forefront of investigative journalism. We are expected to believe that the Garda Commissioner, who we know has a legal responsibility under the Garda Síochána Act to inform the Minister of serious matters of public interest, did not inform the Minister about these very serious tapes, yet they ended up in the hands of one of the Garda's favourite sources of information.

The greatest challenge is that we are expected to believe there is something unusual here. There is nothing unusual here.

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