Marc MacSharry (Sligo-Leitrim, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Everything changes yet everything stays the same. Professor Sean Barrett of Trinity College Dublin, a former Senator, used to have a phrase when he was in that House, "There is a back stairs for the banks into the Department of Finance". We were in government when he first said that but nothing has changed and that notional back stairs is still very much there. We formulate policy to facilitate the banks' profitability and tell the people it is in the systemic interest of all communities. I am not against profitability but I am against a stacked version of the rules that facilitates their profitability at the expense of our community. To me that is not democracy.

It used to be Fine Gael policy and indeed Fianna Fáil policy that we would have a State bank, that we would establish one with the needs of the people in mind, one with interest rates that were not extortionate, as Deputy Cahill put it. However, we have not done that. Once people go into government in this country, they go native. We are told we cannot spook the markets. We are told we cannot spook the horses, we have to keep things stable. Deputy McGuinness has made a very good suggestion which I support, namely, that we must move towards community banking. We no longer have mutuals in this country, there is no Irish Permanent Building Society, no Educational Building Society and no Irish Nationwide Building Society. Some may celebrate that fact but the reality is we only have what is driven by cold profitability.

This week we see Bank of Ireland throwing its staff under the bus in the interests of technology. Ulster Bank did it before Bank of Ireland, as did AIB to an extent. Believe me, AIB is coming like a train to do the same, when it sees the reaction. When I read our party briefing material on Monday morning, having heard about it on "Morning Ireland", I said it looked like it was written by the banks. It was using terms like "counterparty" and so on. As a former financial services employee, those are the terms of lease agreements, loan agreements and so on. It is time, therefore, we began to realise the systemic importance of our communities and put people to the centre of that. To that end, we should embrace what was a Fine Gael policy, and I want my party colleagues to embrace what was our policy. We did it with the Agricultural Credit Corporation, ACC, and with the Industrial Credit Corporation, ICC, and it was never more needed than it is today. We cannot operate a democracy where, depending on who the protagonists are, there are different rules. As we saw with Davy Stockbrokers and so on, we must keep adjusting laws to facilitate their profitability so let us get into the market ourselves, establish a people's bank, through An Post, the credit union movement or others, and put our people at the centre of our financial policy.

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