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

Yes. It is legitimate, and I will explain the connection if it is not clear. I think it is fairly clear. This is about the disposal of its assets by Anglo Irish Bank and IBRC and huge write-downs it gave to the benefit of one person we know, at least, who happens to be Ireland's wealthiest and most powerful businessman - somebody who had a record of past connections with a previous Fine Gael Government and had adverse findings made against him.

My point is this stuff still goes on, it needs to be investigated and it has taken us this long. Therefore, although I support the Bill, I ask why it has taken us this long. Why must we now have a judge tell us that the initial basis of the commission was inadequate and could not do the job it was set up to do? It is not difficult to be a little suspicious and conspiratorial. I would like to think I am wrong, but one looks at the record of this saga, of how long it took us to get to the point where the Government even accepted that it was necessary to have an investigation into it, and then we have an investigation set up which we subsequently discover simply did not have the teeth to get to the sort of answers that it was set up to get. Added to that web of connections is the fact that at the centre of this is a look at a deal with the aforementioned Denis O'Brien, and meanwhile the ordinary mortgageholder is shafted. That is what ordinary people see, that is what I see and that is what needs to change.

I will respond to probably the only relevant question Deputy Joan Burton raised when she spoke about our attitude to the banks and how we could avoid this. Of course, something we must learn out of all of this, the debacle of the banking crisis and IBRC, is how all that happened and how we ensure it does not happen again. I am not sure this investigation can give us those answers. This is more specific, and rightly so. As Deputy Paul Murphy stated, if the commission throws its net too wide, it will be like Jarndyce and Jarndyce, for those who have ever read Charles Dickens' Bleak House, the legal battle that goes on for so long that nobody remembers what it was all about in the first place but a lot of lawyers get rich. Indeed, how pertinent that remains today in so many cases. We do not want a Jarndyce and Jarndyce. We want a short, sharp focused investigation into the particular transaction in relation to Siteserv, Denis O'Brien etc., and maybe a few of the other big write-downs that happened, and whether that was all above board. That is what we need. I hope this investigation can get those answers. I remain somewhat sceptical, given the saga of all this to date.

Even beyond that, and with the terms of reference of what this can achieve, we need to ask how we prevent all this happening again. Contrary to what Deputy Joan Burton and sometimes the Government suggest, we are not naysayers who do not have a proposal. We have a definite, simple proposal, that is, that banks - all of them - should be taken into public ownership and their mandate should change in order that it is not primarily about making money but about lubricating the economy and having particular social and societal objectives. That is what banking should be about. If banking were about that, we would not have had IBRC and this sort of stuff. Where does that culture come from where, if this person's e-mail is correct, somebody who was working for KPMG was then working for IBRC and then ended up working with this charitable trust that has taken over some of the loans sold to it by IBRC? The sort of culture that produces that is simply one of greed that is deeply entrenched in the logic of a private for-profit banking system. It is the nature of the beast. It cannot be regulated out of existence and it is a fantasy to believe it will be.

Signs on it that we are correct, because after the crash, in 2008, that was the big mantra. There was a general acceptance, even from those who had been the cheerleaders for all this madness prior to 2008, that maybe we needed to look at a bit of regulation, in Europe and in Ireland. The story moves on to where we are now and it has to be asked whether anything has changed when, once again, the property market is going crazy and we are selling off these banks that we bailed out just as they get to the point where they can generate a bit of revenue which we could possibly put back into areas such as housing. Deputy Joan Burton and the Labour Party were involved in starting the flogging off. It is extraordinary.

When we are asked where we will get the money from for the big social housing programme that we are always talking about and which it is claimed is the stuff of fantasy, my answer is, simply, the banks. We probably have the best capitalised banks in Europe at present. There are enormous amounts of capital in them and they will not lend it for the sort of things we need. I went to the consultation of the Minister, Deputy Coveney, yesterday on the issue of housing and, of course, the debate was circumscribed by a debate about finance and the complete failure of the market to deliver the investment we desperately need to get it off the ground. It simply does not occur to the Government or the political establishment, which is hard to understand after everything that has happened, that maybe we should take control of the banks we bailed out and direct their lending and investment decisions towards things that would be beneficial to society. To boot, we would have oversight of those banks, of their priorities and of their internal structures and we would have power to do something if anything went wrong, none of which we have in either these privatised bodies or these bodies that are set up and ring-fenced with commercial secrecy in order that detailed questions cannot be asked or five or six years of criticism, demands and pressuring the Government must be gone through eventually to get to some kind of investigation. Surely we can do a bit better than that.

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