Shane Ross (Dublin South, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I wish to point out something particularly significant in this motion, that is, that the entire Technical Group with its extraordinary differences of approach to the economy and to matters such as this has united behind this motion and it has attracted the support of other Independents as well. Their reasons may be very different but they believe that the taking on and the shouldering of this debt is wrong. Those on the left, I suspect, sincerely believe it is wrong for ideological reasons, that it has nothing to do with the Irish people. They rightly believe that it was incurred by a few people who had no responsibility and with whom they do not wish to associate and have never wished to associate. Those who believe in the free market - I was struck by what Deputy Peter Mathews said and he is right - also believe that it is crackers to be paying back this amount of money. As Deputy Mathews correctly said, they believe that those who live by the sword should die by the sword. I have said this before in the House. At the time that this was happening, I met a large number of fund managers, some of whom were bond holders, and they could not believe it. This was a sucker nation. They expected to be burnt. They expected us not to pay it back and they would not have given a hoot about it. They would have come back for more if they had thought it was good value several weeks later. That is the way the markets work.

Instead of listening to the people of Ireland and instead of adhering to what the fund managers expected, we listened to Mr. Trichet. I remember speaking, as did many others in this House, to the former Minister for Finance, the late Brian Lenihan, who made no secret of the fact that he suggested informally that we should not honour this so-called debt and he was told by Mr. Trichet to take that idea off the table or all bets would be off. That type of craven attitude, unfortunately, has left us in the situation we are in now because the bondholders would have accepted it. The capitalist markets understand that this is how things work but for some reason this and the last Government refused even to go to them and eyeball them and say they were not paying this or that they were not paying some of it. That was the wrong attitude. The markets would have understood and the bondholders would have expected to have been burnt. It was an appalling decision for several reasons. That is why left and right and centre, and market-led people, are united on that today.

We should ask the question that those great people from Ballyhea are asking tonight. Why is it not our debt? We accept that the Government and the last Government have some responsibility. We accept that our banks were not regulated properly. We accept that the regulator was at fault. We accept that the developers were at fault. We accept too, maybe, that the borrowers were at fault, the banks here who did it, but we do not accept that the lenders were blameless in this particular matter. The Government is negotiating or putting forward what it calls insolvency agreements on a micro scale to allow borrower and lender to come to a settlement on the basis that both parties in this particular operation have a shared responsibility for what happened. That is the same in this case because there was reckless borrowing. The activities of the banks here were unforgivable but the activities of those who lent to them were reckless too and they should pay a price.

As a result of this motion we should look as part of the recapitalisation and the stress test happening next year for an overall settlement. The motion does not say "default" - it calls on the Government to immediately lobby the ECB for a one-off exemption - and is careful in its wording. We should look for a final settlement when next year we will be forced to recapitalise the banks, regardless of what the Government says about legacy debt which will not happen, out of the ESM. We should go forward and say we want an overall settlement which will include those matters referred to in the motion. After the stress tests we should look for that settlement and take heed of what has been done today and we should applaud those people outside the gates this evening for the great service they have done to the Irish people and the example they have shown to us.

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