Ciarán Cannon (Fine Gael)

I would prefer to trust the words of the Nobel prize-winning Professor Joseph Stiglitz when he dismissed as nonsense the ideas that governments must act when banks run into difficulty. He went on to say that what we were actually doing was proposing to rob the taxpayers by socialising the losses while privatising the gains associated with the banking crisis. We are asking people to compensate gamblers for their losses because the gamblers might be reluctant to gamble with us again if we do not.