Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

I also want to deal with the question of Bank of Ireland. The Minister for Finance described it as a phased exit from the State’s stake in the bank. What that translates as is a process of full privatisation. After having bailed out the banks when they were in difficulty, fattened them up with public funds and returned them to profitability, we now propose to hand them back fully over to the private market which crashed them and caused the crisis in the first place. It is a disastrous decision from the point of view of the workers in the banks, the customers and society as a whole. We have seen time and again the problems of privatised banking. The 2008 crisis should be a lesson to us all that never again should such massive economic power be in the hands of a tiny number of banks. The lesson is that banking should be democratically controlled-----

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