Dan Boyle (Green Party)

It is good and proper that the House should have an opportunity today to discuss the developing situation of the recapitalisation of the banks. I am aware that the Leader is making every effort to arrange for the appropriate Minister to come to the House to respond. If this proves possible, then the House should have such a debate. The last sitting day of the week is always more difficult.

I agree with Senator Mullen that we could concentrate on what was read and what was known and what was acted upon but the salient issue that we as a political system must take account of is that an action has taken place that goes beyond the realms of fraud and is an action that is nothing less than economic treason. The political system needs to be clear in stating that the activities of people who used the cover of a guarantee scheme agreed in both Houses of the Oireachtas fundamentally to cook the books of an organisation to create an impression of stability and profitability is regarded as nothing less than shameful by the entire nation. The people involved need to be brought to account.

Those of us in the political system who are trying to oversee this situation, attempting to analyse and define it are not the people who have engaged in these activities but we have to accept that the people who have been involved are the very people we have lionised over the past decade and a half. We as a society must get to grips with their activities, their actions and the effects of what they have been doing to this economy. To do otherwise would be the real failure of politics and the political system. We can argue as much as we like between ourselves, point fingers and score points, but it does not change the essential element that what has gone wrong has caused the undermining of this nation's credibility. The people who should be brought to account are still out there, still enjoying some vestiges of respectability and we as a political system cannot allow that respectability to attach one moment longer.

If this House has the opportunity to debate the issue today, I suggest that this is the message that needs to go out from the Houses of the Oireachtas. We cannot take this type of self-aggrandisement and enrichment any more. The country cannot afford it and the country cannot prosper into the future with the existence of these people and their activities.