Shane Ross (Dublin South, Independent) | Oireachtas source

With the permission of the House, I wish to share time with Deputy Donnelly.

This debate marks the departure, and possibly the last speeches and contributions, of two of the most eloquent Members of this House that I can remember. Deputy Higgins's contribution to the banking inquiry was unmatched. His contributions to the workings of this House over the years - many of which, of course, many of us have disagreed with but which have been utterly honourable and well thought-out - have been elegant, and his dedication to his constituents and his own ideals has been uncompromising and utterly admirable in the history of this House and very unusual. The speech made by Deputy Rabbitte, which was also his farewell speech, was consistent with his long history of, as Deputy Tóibín stated, raising debate here onto a higher plane. Indeed, some of his successors might take that into account. He has done the State a great deal of service and his final contribution was also a great credit to him. It is right that I would say that.

Of course, I disagree with almost everything Deputy Rabbitte said in his speech but that does not in any way detract from what I said earlier. When he said that any parliament that does not have the right of proper inquiry - as this one was not - is a diminished parliament, he was correct. Dáil Éireann is a diminished House. However, the Deputy ought to ask why it is a diminished House. The people decided that the Members of this House in their wisdom were not fit to carry out an inquiry of the sort that perhaps they would have wished. That is an honourable decision. It is a decision we should respect. It is a reflection on who is sovereign and on the low esteem into which this House has sunk as a result of its failure to reform. We should take cognisance of that and not merely state that we should go back to the people and have another referendum.

As a result, the inquiry chaired by Deputy Ciarán Lynch - I share the tributes to their hard work, not to their findings - was utterly hamstrung in what it could produce. As I said yesterday, the result of this was that the happiest people in Ireland yesterday and today are those who were being or were meant to be asked the hard questions. When I look at this report, at the reaction and at the leaks, I realise that, far from putting in the dark or on the defensive those who were asked the questions, the report is a get-out-of-jail card for the bankers. The bankers are the ones rejoicing because this report could not find any fault with them. They could come in, answer the questions and, in effect, get a clean bill of health because no finding of fact could be made against them. The same is true of the developers, the auditors, the consultants and, indeed, individually, the regulators.

That is the effect of the inquiry. It has half-rehabilitated those people who were meant to be on the defensive. They are walking free, obviously innocent people, but also uncriticised, because the report could not criticise them. What sort of report is it? We have a fall guy who is rightly indicted in the report, namely, Jean-Claude Trichet. While what he did was utterly unacceptable, the fact that his name is in lights because the others could not be touched makes the report a fiasco, a waste of time and very difficult for many of us to accept.

There is another reason the inquiry was flawed from the beginning. Just a few minutes ago, the debate deteriorated into a political spat between Fianna Fáil and the Labour Party. The banking inquiry was all about politics.

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