Dan Boyle (Green Party)

The debate on the economy is ongoing in this House, as is the question of our financial institutions, and I am confident there will be further debates. There is a need for legislation, especially on the National Pension Reserve Fund. I am sure it will come before the House at the earliest opportunity and will again give Members the chance to talk about it.

In announcing the bank guarantee scheme in October, the Minister for Finance was clear that recapitalisation may be possible. That is now even more clear as the Government has announced that a fund will be made available should banks avail of it. However, this should not be taken as a negotiating process. If the State is to get involved in the business of recapitalisation, it must be done on stringent conditions, the first of which is that the money has to be made available for direct lending. We must learn from the mistakes of other jurisdictions, when billions of euro, dollars and sterling were put into other financial institutions with no net effect. I hope that any future debates we have on the issue will outline that. The issue of governance must be also addressed. The people who got us into this mess cannot be trusted to get us out of it. The political system will collectively relay that message when we need to make these decisions.

I have already stated my unhappiness with the decision of the Equality Authority. Some Members are confusing the contribution I made on the absence of human rights recognition in the Charities Bill 2007 with my position on the Equality Authority. I do not believe there are outside influences affecting this, but rather unelected influences within the Government that are having a disproportionate effect. There are personal agendas and biases that are informing policy in this area. The Equality Authority was prepared to take a 33% cut in its budget, and this could still have proceeded as long as the utterly stupid proposal to relocate to Roscrea did not go ahead.