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

The inescapable logic of what needs to be done in response to what I consider to be a pretty serious crisis in the banking and financial system is that we need to take it into public ownership. The Minister might say that my colleagues and I were always going to say that, but I think it sort of adds weight to a socialist case that has long been made, one which we strongly put forward in the aftermath of the financial crash of 2008, that very unlikely voices in this House who are part of one of the Government parties are now making exactly the same case, namely, that a profit-driven banking and financial system is simply not up to the job of providing the banking and financial services that society needs. As the banks put the interests of private shareholders first, they are willing to throw communities the length and breadth of the country to the wolves in terms of banking services and jobs for very significant sections of society. This really is creating a very serious crisis for the whole financial system.

This should be considered together with the Davy scandal that has broken and that also has its origins in the sort of rotten, profit-driven culture of the banking system in this country and, in particular, Anglo Irish Bank. As Members know, Mr. Kearney was one of the "Maple 10" and he initially was given money to buy Anglo Irish Bank bonds to artificially keep up the price of the bank. That scandal is still with us. What has been revealed is an insider trading scandal in one of the supposedly most respectable stockbrokers in the country and which actually has its origins in the rotten, profit-driven banking culture that has done such damage to our society. That damage continues to be felt. Now we have these bankers whom we bailed out at a net cost of €41 billion and this is how they thank us. This is how they thank their customers and their workers - they just shut down. The rotten carry-on that we saw in Anglo Irish Bank still ripples through to what is going on in Davy Stockbrokers as these ruthless, profit-driven people are shafting each other with effective insider trading.

Of course, that all has a cost for society because the money these people make does not come from nowhere. Ultimately, it comes out of the pockets of ordinary people who work for these institutions and from society as a whole. I put it to the Minister very seriously - I know he thinks I was always going to do so - that the case for having a not-for-profit publicly run banking system that has social objectives rather than profit as its objective is now unanswerable.

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