Peter Mathews (Dublin South, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I move amendment No. 1:

To insert the following subparagraph after subparagraph (3)(a)(ii):"(iii) that Deputy Peter Mathews be an additional professionally qualified member of the Select Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis,"

I put on the record that I wish to thank the Ceann Comhairle because there was a great danger that this debate may have gone ahead without any of the Independent Deputies who do not belong to the Technical Group having a voice. That would have been travesty of this Parliament. I thank the Ceann Comhairle for that and I appreciate it. It was with reluctance that the Government conceded that yesterday.

This is an extremely important landmark for this country and it should be done honestly, openly and transparently, setting aside politics. The reason is that since 2009 when the crisis exploded into the destruction that was left, 250,000 people have emigrated, 385,000 remain on the live register of the unemployed, which is a total of 635,000, which is equivalent to nine stadia the size of Croke Park full to capacity or 16 stadia the size of the Aviva Stadium full to capacity. Moving on to the families in mortgage arrears, which number 135,000 to 140,000, that equates to nearly 500,000 based on there being 2.7 people per household. If we add the 90,000 on the housing waiting lists, we begin to get some sort of feel for the hurt, distress and financial destruction that followed from the collapse in 2008.

The Taoiseach said in his contribution that we want to have the origins fully understood. That is actually quite easy and straightforward to do but it has been avoided so far. All one needs to do is to look at the balance sheets of all the licensed deposit-taking banking and building society institutions starting in 2001 through to 2008 at six monthly intervals and one will see the evidence. They are the facts, not opinions. It is not like an artist or a sculptor giving his or interpretation of things. They are the cold facts. Those balance sheets show that the greatest credit pyramid in the history of Europe was building up in Ireland. Iceland, a little island, had it at ten times smaller than us, but we had it. The evidence is there. If we end the picture with the collapse in 2008 and the bank guarantee, which will be another thing to examine and inquire about, the boards of directors of the institutions of which they are the directors and the stewards have prudential responsibility to make sure that the balance sheet management of the assets they create from the deposits that they take are properly managed prudentially and that loan to deposit ratios, which are the fractional reserving principle, are adhered to, so all we have to do is bring in the boards of directors from between 2001 and 2008, sit them down and their auditors behind them, present the balance sheets and ask them to make their observations on the history - the journey - from 2001 to 2008. One cannot have a credit bubble which supports an asset price bubble unless there is a pyramid building up. To take, for example, Bank of Ireland's balance sheet at 2008, it had a loans to customer deposits ratio of 158% instead of 90%. In addition, it had senior secured bond funding on its balance sheet of €61 billion - 40% of the Irish national income. That is crazy stuff.

I will not go into further details but we can see how simple it is if we know the questions to ask, and they have been there but nobody wanted to hear those questions. Being left off a committee in July of last year, I did not get a chance even to make a contribution. I have sat in and listened to other people and witnesses, whether it was Patrick Honohan of the Central Bank or management from the banks, talking about different things and I could not ask questions because the Whips and the Government said I could not and that I was off the committee. It was absurd.

I thank the various Members from the other parties and from the Technical Group for supporting the amendment to include me on the select committee. I wrote to the Taoiseach and to the Ceann Comhairle, as Chair of the Committee on Procedure and Privileges, in January saying that I would very much like to serve. This is a matter of service for the people. It is not politics. In some ways I am glad I am no longer in a party and that I can do this - on the face of it totally objectively - namely, help by asking the right questions during the course of the inquiry.

There is the next stage which is the how the bank guarantee came about, the consequences of that and, as Deputy Shortall said, what sort of pressures were put on the previous Government and so on. We need to inquire about the prudential capital assessment reviews as well.

I will give a little anecdote. In July and August 2009, before Professor Honohan was appointed as Governor of the Central Bank, I was in his office in Trinity College showing him the analysis of the up-to-date balance sheets of the six Irish-owned banks. There was no chance that the figures produced by the so-called experts for the loan losses that would be associated with the NAMA transfers would be correct, but it was again dismissed. Mr. Elderfield has also left his position. It is funny how many people have left after completing less than half their terms of office in the Central Bank or the Financial Regulator. He claimed they had the models from BlackRock Solutions, Boston Consulting Group and Barclay's Capital which showed that the capital assessment requirements were accurate. I said that if one looked at the balance sheets and remembered that €200 billion of extra turbo-charged lending was done in less than four years by six Irish banks, there was no possibility that when everything stopped more than half of that would be collected. That was the true indicator of the scale of the losses, but it was dismissed.

We need to be objective. Luckily my training is in auditing and I can be objective. The facts speak for themselves. The bits of the jigsaw are in the box and it is a matter of placing them out there and getting all the directors of all the institutions to show us whether individually or collectively they understood what they were doing. More than 1.5 million Irish people are distressed as a result of the consequences and they need to hear it. They do not have the time to read Watson-Regling, Honohan or Nyberg reports. They need to see visibly those people who had the fiduciary responsibility.

I ask that the amendments be supported in the interests of the people we are here to serve. I believe we should take off all our political clothing for the purpose of this inquiry and do it professionally, honestly and well. It can be done and it should be done.

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