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

The context for this debate is what happened to ordinary citizens in this country in 2012. When some of us on this side of the House screamed in opposition to the vicious cuts imposed, particularly in budget 2012, that hit the most vulnerable people and when many people in this House asked in the same year whether the unsustainable debts of tens of thousands of ordinary mortgage holders who were just trying to keep a roof over the heads could be written down, we were told this could not happen under any circumstances because there would be moral hazard associated with doing it. At the same time that ordinary people were being told that they could not have their debts written down by the banks we had bailed out, those same banks were writing down the debts of companies to the tune of hundreds of millions of euro and to the benefit of some of the richest people in the country, including the richest person in the country. There were three or four different deals from which he benefited to the tune of hundreds of millions of euros in writedowns paid for by the taxpayer.

Concerns expressed by the Minister's Department on foot of questions raised in this House at that time were simply covered up in the sense that the Minister did not bring those concerns to the attention of this House even though his own Department was saying it had concerns. Why has it taken years to drag this out of him instead of a Government that is supposed to be in favour of transparency coming before the Dáil and saying it had big concerns about what was happening with these writedowns? Why did the Minister not do that? This raises suspicions from the word go. When the Minister was finally forced to accept that there was something to look into, he got the insiders to do it. These are the people who were involved in this dubious sale - KPMG. It is unbelievable. He is asking people to investigate themselves. How can he seriously expect that to be a serious investigation?

Government Deputies piled into the Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform today to oppose a motion I put down that stated that the committee should ask some of the key players to come before it to answer questions. The Government does not want that either. Instead, it wants the insiders involved in the deal to investigate themselves. This is a joke and stinks to high heaven.

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