Eugene Regan (Fine Gael)

Of course, I respect that. The person who delivered this speech is, in fact, Deputy Brian Cowen, the current Taoiseach, and it was delivered to the Royal Irish Academy last year. The point is that he stated, "As a nation we cannot progress equity without ongoing public investment in areas such as health and education which impact on our most vulnerable citizens." This is just one year out from the collapse in the economy and the collapse in public finances. To suggest at that time, with the knowledge he had, that there were a few little challenges but everything was essentially hunky dory is very worrying. This is the man who is leading the country and is intent on leading us out of our economic difficulties.

Senator Fitzgerald raised the issue of the emergency legislation on the guarantee to banks. We need to have that debate which was promised on the economy. It has been stated in this House on a number of occasions that the emergency legislation and the guarantee only resolved one issue — liquidity — but it did not resolve the issue of capitalisation. It is a self-evident fact that if one must provide a guarantee, there must be recapitalisation of the banks before that guarantee can ever be lifted. The markets indicate day in, day out that such action is required. The Government has dithered on it and it only introduced the bank guarantee in a crisis. What the Government is waiting for is another full-blown crisis in the banking sector before it acts or indicates any type of coherent policy.

The Minister for Finance got a great deal of kudos for that bank guarantee scheme which he introduced, albeit in a crisis. However, in a survey in the Financial Times today he ranks bottom of all of the Ministers of Finance in Europe. That is very bad for this Government and for this economy. It does not give us confidence that either the Taoiseach or the Minister for Finance can devise a strategy to take us out of the current economic difficulties. I do not know if the Leader would concur with that assessment.