John McGuinness (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

A 2012 report by Transparency International referring to a national integrity systems, NIS, assessment of Ireland it conducted in 2009 said the following:

The 2009 NIS reported that perceptions of legal corruption in Ireland are higher than perceptions of corruption prohibited in legislation. Legal corruption is facilitated when there are no legal barriers in place to curb undue influence over public policy making, prevent regulatory 'capture' and ensure political accountability. Legal corruption played a role in the poor regulation and weak oversight of financial institutions which led to Ireland's banking crisis. The crisis has been described by a parliamentary committee as 'the greatest challenge to the State since it was founded in 1922'.

Bearing that independent commentary in mind, I want to reflect on the Finance Bill and ask the Minister what oversight is in place through his Department to ensure value for money, transparency and accountability. The Government allocates massive amounts of money to companies such as Iarnród Éireann and similar semi-State bodies that have very little or no accountability to the House. Appropriate measures would be forensic accounting, an examination and audit and a teasing out by Members of Parliament of exactly how the money is spent. If that were done, the Minister might get better value for money, better services and there might be a better understanding of why the school transport system, for example, is not as good as it should be and why it, like many other services, is still in the dark ages. There is little or no accountability for the money the Government gives to semi-State bodies.

At every turn they are back looking for more money, but no one looks at the efficiency or the audit within the companies. The Comptroller and Auditor General is very limited in what he does with the money, the spend, that he can examine. For example, going through the Houses at present is the Water Services Bill, and I praise Deputy Catherine Murphy for tabling an amendment that would empower the Comptroller and Auditor General to examine Irish Water's accounts, report to the House and have the Committee of Public Accounts examine them. There was very little appetite for the amendment, but I hope now that my party and the Government will ensure the safe passage of the amendment. Irish Water received €2.6 billion to the end of 2017 and it is envisaged that the State will give it €1 billion a year onwards. Alongside this, the commercial water charges that are being collected by Irish Water and the rates it now charges for the traps at various fast food outlets, for example, will all go into a pile of money that is not examined by the State but which is currently examined, albeit not very efficiently, by the auditor within local government. If we are really serious about ensuring we get transparency and accountability regarding the money contained in the Finance Bill for every single Department, the changes that are necessary to bring this about need to be driven not by the Opposition but openly by the Government. It is my firm belief that if the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, did this, he would impose on Irish Water the same moral compass and decency he has. That is what is lacking in many of the organisations I am speaking about. They feel they have the right to do what they are doing. They feel they have avoided the transparency that would have been imposed upon them if the political classes in this country had a mind to do so and were awake when legislation was being passed.

There is an awful lot riding on the Minister's shoulders. He was a member of the Committee of Public Accounts and saw how it can make agencies and Departments of State account for themselves. The only regret I have, looking back on my ten years on the committee, is that when the various reports were made available to the line Ministers, they by and large ignored them or paid lip service to them, or the very civil servants on whom one must rely to enforce the law just did not bother to enforce it.

That is essentially what happened to our banks. It has everything to do with the Finance Bill what is allocated to the banks, and there is no regulation. The Central Bank does not examine forensically the activities of the banks. There is almost a reluctance to do so. When we look back on the past ten years, do we think any of them are capable of even understanding what moral suasion is? I visited Capita recently on behalf of clients - I do the same in respect of the banks - and its hard-nosed disrespect and the manner in which it bludgeons its customers is shocking. This is not the senior, older bankers. It is the younger, newer ones coming in. They have now been indoctrinated into that very same culture the Minister spoke about today at the press conference. I was there and I believe his sincerity in dealing with it. However, again coming back to transparency and accountability, until such time as he insists on every single bank having an ethical officer, someone who would oversee what is going on and be able to report directly to the Central Bank and to the Minister, he will not get change. The reason he will not get change is that banks are not driven by ethics or a moral compass. What drives banks is money. As one senior person in Capita said to me recently about a client, "Go to your neighbours, your friends, your mother, your father, your community, the credit union, but what we want is money, money, money."

If that is the thinking that dominates in the banks in a culture that has been passed down to the next generation of bankers, the Minister has a job on his hands. I will support him in every way I can to see that culture broken because that culture has broken the nation. It has broken families beyond repair, made their lives miserable, removed hope from their lives and shown in the most awful way, without any shame on the part of the banks, that they have no compassion, humanity or decency. They believe that they live in a State in which this can go on. I do not think any community in the country wants that kind of State. They look for political leadership, but we have not given that leadership for the past ten or 15 years or more. The Central Bank promised it in 2010 and 2015. Charlie Weston wrote about it in 2009. Nothing has happened. It is the same culture, and we must break it within the Oireachtas by ensuring we do these things in committee and by being open and transparent ourselves.

I wish to move to the issue of financial reporting. I have tried for years, again through the Committee of Public Accounts, to ensure that the HSE and the Garda would have one single financial reporting system. I often asked the Minister about this at the committee meetings. They acknowledged again recently that they still do not have a single financial reporting system. What gets counted gets done. If there is no analysis, it is not possible to know what is going on in an organisation. The Minister increased significantly the money that the health services get, but it is going into the same structure, the same old way of doing business, and some of those senior people within the HSE who manage it are not fit for purpose. There are too many managers. The front line is the Band-Aid that holds it all together, and by the time the money gets down to the front line, the services get so diluted that the citizen, the patient, suffers dramatically.

The same applies to the Garda. We can have all the agencies and all the oversight of those agencies we want, but if the culture that exists is not broken, they will not recognise the fact that they are accountable. Garda, banker or politician, we are all accountable and we as leaders within our communities and at national level must ensure through this Parliament that accountability is first and foremost, that the value for money flag flies over this House and that we are not afraid to root out the people who have caused such distress in the State. This is why citizens say, and I heard it said tonight, that if a person does not pay his or her television licence, he or she will get fined. That lone parent in court today was fined €120. Others were fined €350. The banks look at these fines like parking tickets. It is part of their business. It is what they do. They issue fines. As one banker said to his own staff when they asked what happens if something goes wrong, "We will pay the fine and you will get on with your business." He used much clearer language than I could not use in this House to his staff. That is what they think about it, and we have to change that.

I tried in vain to convince the political system in my own party that the National Housing Co-operative Bill was a runner and that it could be worked on. I will give it to the Minister. He can have it. The legislation was written by a very eminent person. The Minister should take it, work on it and change it, but for God's sake, he should stop what is happening in the courts. That has a huge cost to this State and to families and individuals. In the Taxing Master's court two weeks ago, 138 cases were listed from AIB. The lawyers came in and had most of them postponed to another date, resulting in more hardship and trauma for those involved. They have nowhere to turn because the banks have all the money.

They have the power to deal with them in a way one would never expect in a country like ours, yet it happens. That is why I ask the Minister to ensure, when he meets the banks, that they stop every one of the repossessions.

What have not been touched on tonight are the tracker mortgages that have been passed on to vulture funds, where people are threatened with the loss of their homes. These cases are not being counted. The figures the bankers gave the Minister have been massaged and he should not think they are not capable of it. At the finance committee hearings that was the one single thing that came across: they believe an apology is sufficient and that once they apologise, they will hunker down and the storm will pass. I hope the Minister will not let that happen. I hope he will speak to the Minister for Justice and Equality and that some arrangement, through the Central Bank and the banks, will be found to stop the repossession of homes because the cost to the State of not doing so would be enormous. It would have to house the people concerned; it would displace people in the housing market, while the number on the housing list, currently 120,000, would grow significantly. I am not exaggerating; I have heard these figures talked about at the committee. The Minister must analyse the issue and stop the the banks when they state to him that they have identified 14,400 cases. Yes, they have, but they stopped a significant number because they were not identified.

The Minister of State at the Department spoke to Mr. Kissane who is an expert on this issue. He said that if he was given five minutes to deal with every case in a bank, he would be able to tell whether they had been impacted on, but he has never been asked. The Minister and the Taoiseach should bring him in and have him explain to them the truth about what is going on in the banks. PTSB went to the High Court and lost. There were similar cases which it took to the High Court and which it still refused to declare as having been impacted on. The families in question become homeless and the Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, has to deal with the matter also. It is shocking.

In the registrar's court, for which we are also paying through the Estimates, to be fair to some of them, the registrars will stop the banks from what they are doing. In the registrar's court in Kilkenny Bank of Ireland had the biggest recent number of cases. The manner in which it speaks to customers before the registrar is appalling and shows no sense of decency whatsoever. We are allowing this to happen in the court and I am asking the Minister to, please, stop it.

When I investigated the money available to support the housing co-op Bill, we discovered that in Europe there were ethical funds with anything up to €5 billion which were prepared to take a loot at various debts, that is, take them from the banks, and push them out over 25 years and make their profits on them in an ethical way. When they travelled to America, they established that these funds were available and that they were able to help. Will the Minister consider taking the Bill, examining the prospect of raising the money privately and ensuring the Bill at least would have the stamp of approval from the State and save all of the people who are being queued in the banks or the courts to lose their homes?

The Minister must have seen - certainly Members have - adults crying at the table in his clinics. I have seen adults in court break down and cry. I know of one court case that has continued for 20 years. I have been in the High Court and the appeals court and have to say they would want to pull up their socks because the way they waste time in dealing with cases is a further abuse of taxpayers' money.

Local government expenditure is audited after the spend by the local government audit team. I put it to the Minister that there should be one auditor general with a sufficient number of staff to examine all of the accounts for which the office should be responsible, including local government accounts. Why should they be exempt from proper scrutiny? Yes, they are audited, but does it ever appear that they are? Do senior executives in any of the councils ever appear before the Committee of Public Accounts? No, they do not. Is it easy to have a question about an audit answered by local government? No, it is not. There are many such cases which the local government audit team picks up, parks and includes in a report which gathers dust. That is what happens. Every single party in this House has a responsibility, having examined the culture in the banks, Departments and agencies, to act in a way that will send a very clear message that what happened in the past is in the past and that in the future there will be accountability, transparency and respect for this Parliament, something I have not seen for a long time and I certainly have not seen it from the banks.

The Minister has set a trend in his desire to put this right and he certainly has my support. He should remember that his language is soft about what happens in the boardrooms of the banks. If, as Deputy Michael Noonan said in 2013, the ECB has a role when it comes to Bank of Ireland and AIB which the Minister owns, the Minister should telephone the ECB tomorrow morning to ask it to, please, come as a body which has no vested interest except in terms of regulation to guide the Central Bank and not to ask the banks but to tell them that they will have to comply with regulations or else the Minister will have to introduce legislation to curtail their activities and change their culture.

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