Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

We regard it as a deliberate exclusion that the Minister has deliberately carried out by stopping the timeline and the clock at February 2013. If the Minister has legal advice to the contrary, he will have an opportunity to put that on the record.

The benchmark of €10 million in respect of capital write-down was raised with the Minister by Sinn Féin. I asked the Minister why arbitrarily he reached for the figure of €10 million. He said it was for the purposes of convenience or to aid the speedy completion of the investigation. I suggest to the Minister that it would be more appropriate for him as a mandatory matter for the commission to drop the threshold to the level of €1 million as suggested in the Sinn Féin amendment. That would facilitate public confidence and allow the judge to examine in a mandatory fashion each and every transaction within that threshold. It would certainly ease public anxiety that there has been attempt after attempt to avoid and dodge the core issues at the heart of these matters. The Taoiseach reached initially for the Committee on Public Accounts and the Comptroller and Auditor General even though that was not legally permissible. We then had the episode around the internal review by KPMG and we are now at this juncture. Even yet, we have in front of us terms of reference that simply do not provide for the scope and timeline required for a full investigation that can enjoy full public confidence.

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