Results 141-160 of 13,375 for speaker:Pat Rabbitte

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis: Nexus Phase (23 Jul 2015)

Pat Rabbitte: What I have said-----

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis: Nexus Phase (23 Jul 2015)

Pat Rabbitte: Thanks, Chairman. What I said, Chairman, in the ... in my opening remarks ... what I said is that, in my view, the main cause of the disaster that befell our country was the out of control property bubble based ... spurred on by tax incentives and expansion real estate. That was the cause of it and that was the specific thing I put in my statement. Mr. ... Senator MacSharry is putting a...

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis: Nexus Phase (23 Jul 2015)

Pat Rabbitte: No, I would be more nuanced in my reaction to it. If it were an appropriate benchmarking, I think it had a role to play at the time. But, unfortunately, it became as so many things at that time a vehicle to dish out substantial amounts of money without discernment or discrimination. But the notion of benchmarking in the public service or in the public sector is not a bad one at all. It's...

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis: Nexus Phase (23 Jul 2015)

Pat Rabbitte: The hospitality issue is an issue of transport, is it? I mean if I got a pint at some stage from a developer, is that included in the rubric of your question?

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis: Nexus Phase (23 Jul 2015)

Pat Rabbitte: Not my-----

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis: Nexus Phase (23 Jul 2015)

Pat Rabbitte: Not that I recall, Senator. I recall travelling to view a business park in Bristol when I was chairman of the county council, or when I was a member of Dublin County Council when we were designing what has now become Citywest Business Park, probably the most prestigious park in the country, and I presume it wasn't Dublin County Council who paid for us to travel. I presume it were the...

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis: Nexus Phase (23 Jul 2015)

Pat Rabbitte: Am I going to tell you?

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis: Nexus Phase (23 Jul 2015)

Pat Rabbitte: Well, I don't think I'm here to pass judgment on my colleagues in other parties. I mean, I don't know, I don't know.

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis: Nexus Phase (23 Jul 2015)

Pat Rabbitte: I don't think it would be appropriate for me to do that, and I don't intend to comment on-----

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis: Nexus Phase (23 Jul 2015)

Pat Rabbitte: Again, I think the actual context in which this happened is important. I happened purely by accident to meet my colleague Eamon Gilmore very early that morning and, you know, my mouth was open at the news I had just heard. And I briefly discussed it with him. Somebody had already been on to him about dated subordinated debt and he said that he had already decided that we should oppose it...

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis: Nexus Phase (23 Jul 2015)

Pat Rabbitte: I could see the circumstances where - if you get a phone call at half-six in the morning from the Minister for Finance, who has been struggling most of the night with an issue as big as this one where the financial system was at risk, I could see that a party like Fine Gael, whose core existence would be supporting the institutions of the State would say "well if the financial system is at...

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis: Nexus Phase (23 Jul 2015)

Pat Rabbitte: I wouldn't like to claim knowledge that we didn't have. This was just such an enormous insurance bet that we were wagering - literally the deeds of the country - on it never being called in and that was a pretty scary place to be. Now I had advocated personally the nationalisation of Anglo privately and ... a date around this time, it's on the record of the House, an intervention I made to...

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis: Nexus Phase (23 Jul 2015)

Pat Rabbitte: Well, I wasn't the leader of the party. I had stepped down a few months earlier as leader of the party. Somebody in those circumstances does not intrude. I mean, I never opened my mouth at a meeting of the parliamentary party for a year and a half. I was not going to intrude onto the territory of the new leadership.

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis: Nexus Phase (23 Jul 2015)

Pat Rabbitte: I think I was influenced by a number of people who brought the weight of official reports to bear on my argument and said these are the authorities that matter and they say the system is robust. In the environment in which we function, political party making its own forecasts has unfortunately little credibility. You tend to fall back on the agencies, national and international, and they...

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis: Nexus Phase (23 Jul 2015)

Pat Rabbitte: I think the main thrust of what I was saying related to the property bubble and the construction sector and we didn't, as I said to Senator MacSharry, we didn't resile from our position on the measures that needed to be taken to rein in the property bubble. We didn't resile from that in any way.

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis: Nexus Phase (23 Jul 2015)

Pat Rabbitte: I have to truthfully ... I have to honestly say that no, I didn't think that way Deputy. In hindsight I probably should have but it just did not occur to me that in the context of almost 15 years of growth, an economy that wasn't shaken off course for very long by the dotcom bubble, that had bounced back that had a huge deficit in infrastructure and that was now able to access cheap money to...

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis: Nexus Phase (23 Jul 2015)

Pat Rabbitte: In this particular respect?

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis: Nexus Phase (23 Jul 2015)

Pat Rabbitte: Well, I don't think that the theatre of the Dáil Chamber is particularly effective in terms of Opposition holding Government to account. If you take the Leaders' Questions moment, which was introduced only latterly, you know, the Opposition take up the issue of the day, whatever party is in opposition, they take up ... whatever is the issue du jouris the issue that they run with, with...

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis: Nexus Phase (23 Jul 2015)

Pat Rabbitte: Well, I think it is very important. I would disagree with the Chairman if his question to Deputy Burton implies that he believes there would have been close contact between the leadership of an Opposition party and, say, the senior officials in the Department of Finance. That did not happen in my experience. Yes, I personally had interaction with senior officials in the Department of...

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis: Nexus Phase (23 Jul 2015)

Pat Rabbitte: I ... the only area-----