Joe O'Reilly (Fine Gael)

It was shocking that people — I will put it that way — appearing on a "Prime Time" programme recently openly boasted they were not paying the interest on their loans. That is a horrendous state of affairs, while huge pressure is being put on individual consumers and on small and medium sized enterprises. That must be a source of concern. We should buy preference shares, remove many executives and boards, introduce rigorous control, insist the banking sector responds to the needs of our economy and those of ordinary people and that it plays its role. If there is a crisis, and all conventional and accepted wisdom suggests there is one, the banking sector cannot be exempt from its role in solving it, particularly in light of the fact it played an enormous and pivotal role in bringing us into it in the first instance.