Liam Twomey (Fine Gael)

It was Warren Buffet, the American investor, who said when talking about the stock markets that we know who is swimming naked only when the tide goes out. If members of this Government were showing a builder's bum last September, they most clearly need those discarded builder's helmets in this month of January 2009 after what has been announced in the past couple of weeks. There has been poor handling of the financial crisis. Today, we are discussing the nationalisation of the third largest bank in our democracy yet we still do not know whether it is the right thing to do because of the refusal of the Government to give us the sort of information we need to make that decision.

It is disgraceful that the Minister for Finance uses words like "confidentiality" about business decisions to deny telling Irish taxpayers why they may have to stump up billions in the next few years to pay for an institution that clearly has been very badly run. This is about more than just the ethics of lying to taxpayers and not telling them the full truth; the background is also dismal. There seems to be a once-off loss of somewhere between €50 billion and €100 billion in the asset value of our economy. This is a significant loss of vanished assets, comprising anything between 30% and 60% of the GDP from one year. We will have to try to spread the loans that were associated with those assets over a period of time to ascertain whether we can recover some of that sum or pay for it in some other way.

As the Minister knows, Government spending is in a similar mess and we will need a significant amount of money in the next five to ten years to sort out public spending. That sum will be €20 billion next year but on average it could be at least €10 billion a year. There will be a horrendous lack of money in the Irish economy in the next decade, which is even to assume we sort out the confidence and financial stability problems we are currently experiencing. Throwing around billions is not an option at this time.

As the Minister has just joined us, I want to repeat the point that we know very little about Anglo Irish——