Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am delighted to have an opportunity to speak on this motion. I am glad that the Government at last has come a small piece of the way to dealing with this issue. However, the very establishment of this inquiry, which is very urgently needed, raises many serious issues. I hope that when the Minister replies to the debate he will give me information on one issue. When the parliamentary replies were being given, did the Minister look at those replies and did he, for example, ever comment that he thought maybe the Department was not being as forthcoming as it should have been in those replies?

When I was Minister for Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs, I used to check any policy answer given by the Department. It was difficult to read every answer when I was Minister for Social Protection for obvious reasons in that most questions related to individual social welfare claimants but I always read answers on policy issues. In a smaller Department, such as the Department of Finance, which receives fewer parliamentary questions, I would have read every reply. If I thought the Department was not forthcoming with the full information, I used to send it back and say that the Deputy was entitled to the full information and there should be no attempt to hold back. Did the Minister, Deputy Noonan, personally read these replies and, at any stage, did he go back to his officials and say he was not very clear as to whether the full information was being given? If he was not clear, the Deputy who asked the question must have been less clear. It seems there has been a policy here, which is common in Departments, to give as little information as possible in parliamentary replies. I have never agreed with this, either as a Minister or as an opposition Deputy. I call it the mushroom treatment - keep them in the dark and heap as much manure as possible on the matter.

I hope there are no thoughts in this Government of using the setting up of this commission as some way of kicking the issue beyond the next election. The least we are owed as parliamentarians is an interim progress report in October.

Deputy Pringle made a fair point about the way in which the Government is operating. There seems to be one rule for the rich and one for the poor. Since I was Minister for Social Protection, I have had constant dealings with an organisation based in the midlands called the Phoenix Project, which deals with people with distressed mortgages. Time and again, it has made suggestions to the Government as to how it could ensure fair play for people who are getting constant hassle from banks in respect of mortgages. If even a part of the allegations being thrown around about preferential interest rates, deals and sales is true for people who are powerful and wealthy, it is worth contrasting that with the treatment of ordinary citizens. The Phoenix Project and I have cases on our desks of very ordinary people who have hit hard times and are managing at great personal cost to pay all of the interest and some of the capital to lenders that are charging outrageous rates of interest. These mortgage holders are still being pursued by the banks for repossession of their property. No wonder people are cynical about what is happening. Proposals have been made to the Department of Finance and to the Taoiseach as to how we could protect these small people.

We will know more when the commission report comes out, but the facts we know now call into question the Minister for Finance's approach to the handling of the large portfolios entrusted to him in March 2011. I will mention three of them: NAMA, IBRC and AIB-Bank of Ireland. The Minister was entrusted with these, running to billions and billions of potential assets. With very little explanation, he has rushed the sale of NAMA assets and I suspect that the issues arising in IBRC will also arise in the way the NAMA assets are being handled. For some reason best known to himself, the Minister is not maximising the State's take on behalf of the people. The whole idea of setting up NAMA was that one could play it along the market over a long period, through both rental and sales, to recoup the money. The Minister then went into a rushed liquidation of IBRC, and we will leave it to the commission to start working over the entrails. I believe we are likely to find that we could have achieved a lot more value. Instead of saying to the bankers, "You made a mess and we are going to get our money back before you get your hands on it, if ever," we are in a rush sale. The Minister has already sold most of Bank of Ireland and now he is in some crazy rush to sell AIB.

I have always believed that at the end of the day, our investments in the bank should, taking an aggregate of the totality, be used to recoup our full money. One way of teaching the bankers not to mess around with the people again was to hold on to the assets, at least until we had recouped all our investments in them. I do not go along with the theory that we should not have ensured that we defend the depositors through the guarantee. It was a question of the best tactic in the short term for stopping a run on the bank. Whatever way we did it, in the long term, we should recoup all the money from the investment in the bank.

AIB, for example, is returning to profit, yet just as it is beginning to give a return on its investment, the Government is trying to get rid of it. It is worthy of note that Irish Life, in its original form, was taken over way back because it ran into financial trouble, and we held on to that company for years and made massive profits for the State by holding on to it. As I remember, it did not stop operating as quite a good life insurance company just because the shareholder happened to be the State.

We need to look at each of the transactions to see whether the Minister for Finance has kept oversight over the operation of NAMA, the IBRC and AIB. We also must question the Government's macro policy, which seems to be to sell the goose that lays the golden eggs. We know what happened the guy who killed the goose that laid the golden egg - he got no more eggs.

See this speech in context