Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The fact that the Minister of State, Deputy Kehoe, has a wry smile on his face tells its own story. He wants to set this thing up in such a way that it works to the political advantage of the Government. That is the reality. Let us not pretend otherwise.

This business of excluding people on the basis of supposed bias has to be taken out of the proposal; otherwise, I cannot accept it. I want the inquiry to take place.

I do not really understand why we have a different system for choosing the chairperson from the one we normally use. The Oireachtas Joint Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform is the appropriate committee to inquire into banking. That is what it does. If it puts forward a proposal to do so and we consider it acceptable that the committee examines areas connected with finance and banking all the time, why the hell do we have to have a special procedure? In this case it may turn out to be the same person, which is sort of immaterial. I do not quite understand why there is a different procedure except that I smell a certain political rat at work as people try to manipulate things.

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