Peter Mathews (Dublin South, Independent) | Oireachtas source

He was almost elected on a shoestring budget, despite the hundreds of thousands of euro spent by one of the Government parties for its candidate. I accompanied him, with some other Independent Deputies, to visit the office of the Governor of the Central Bank at the end of July to ask these questions and be allowed to attend the ECB and meet its members in order that we could make the case that the Government had failed to make. Of what is the Government afraid? For God's sake, is it fear itself?

Ashoka Mody, the IMF director in Ireland during the time of the troika, said the austerity regime, as it had been presented to us, was not right and that there should be a debt write-down. Why is that? The debt is the losses. Americans face up to losses. Even in its crisis, America helped Europe, something that is completely missed here. The same thing is beginning to happen again. The Federal Reserve System is in a headlock, beholden to Wall Street again. The markets which are governed by either fear or greed went into a mini tailspin yesterday, with the German DAX down almost 3%, the French CAC 40 down 3%, the FTSE down nearly 3% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average down nearly 3%. This happens when the people who should be leading countries and ministries of finance become involved in chattering rather than getting to grip with the facts.

With regard to moral hazard, Tim Geithner said that when one was in a crisis, one had to forget about all of that and solve the crisis. One must do what is practical and save the system. One must save it correctly, not with sticking plaster but with deep infusions of capital to take losses. This has still not been done in Europe. The Minister will recall that in 2012 the real effects of debt-----

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