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

That raises very serious questions. This is somebody who owes €500 million to one bank, where there are now allegations that he was not meeting the terms of those loans and was looking to renegotiate them, who gets an enormous write-down to his benefit when he takes over Siteserv, and the bank that lends him the money to buy the company is 100% publicly owned. Do we not need to look into the decisions to lend him money for that transaction and other big loans or write-downs, the question of Independent News and Media and the €100 million write-down, which, to some extent, benefitted Denis O’Brien?

The Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport put this in context. The big context is that in a period when child poverty rose and 137,000 children live in consistent poverty, Denis O’Brien’s wealth went from €2.2 billion in 2009 to €6.9 billion by 2015. That is a massive transfer of wealth from ordinary people into the pockets of the new oligarchs. That is a very serious context in which we need all the answers about the most important job this Government and the Minister for Finance had, the disposal of the assets and loans of the banks we bailed out, who they went to and did that involve enriching a tiny insider elite, as the evidence suggests it certainly might have.

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