Alex White (Labour)

I move amendment No. 1:

In page 16, before section 2, to insert the following new section:

2.—(1) For the purposes of this Act, "the Oversight Committee" shall mean a committee of the Houses of the Oireachtas, or a sub-committee thereof so enjoined and appointed by a Resolution of the Houses, consisting of specified persons not being members of the Houses of the Oireachtas to report to the Houses of the Oireachtas every 30 days on the operation of this Act and the activities of NAMA.

(2) The Minister, NAMA, and any other body or person having functions under this Act shall be required to co-operate with the Oversight Committee in the performance of its functions.

When we view what has occurred in the past year or year and a half, one of the recurring themes of much of the commentary, and certainly what people will say to you when they sit down and analyse what has happened and how we got to this position with the banks and the financial institutions, is the question of whether anybody could see what was happening. We make this point frequently with the Minister that there was a lack of sufficient, or any visible, oversight or monitoring of, for example, the lending policies and strategies of the main financial institutions. No doubt we will continue that political debate and in my view there will be a political reckoning which will visit the Government in due course when the people get an opportunity to decide on that issue. I do not want to deal with that precise issue at present.

In the context of this amendment I want to see if we can look to the future. It looks inevitable that the NAMA legislation will be passed this week by the Houses. I am interested, as I am sure the Minister and all of us are, in going some short way towards trying to ensure that there is a serious measure of public knowledge, information and transparency in the operation of the institutions that we are about to put in place. All of the points on how momentous this is and what considerable financial exposure it will entail in future for taxpayers and for the community, can be made again for effect. We can make all of those points, but I will take those as read. I ask the Minister to agree it is highly desirable that institutions and mechanisms should be put in place to ensure a significantly heightened level of public information and knowledge of what is being done in our name in the context of NAMA.

The Irish people are entitled to measures which, with respect to the Minister, I do not see in the legislation, which will go some way towards ensuring that there is no repeat of people's sense, not just that things went wrong, but that persons who were supposed to oversee and monitor matters were not doing what they were expected to do.

It is not enough for the Government to say, "Trust us, this will be done efficiently, in a proper manner and in the interests of the public and of the taxpayer". While I do not doubt that would be the motivation of the Government, it is no longer any use for Governments of any political persuasion to state, "Trust us, we are the Government". That just will not wash. No matter how beyond criticism they may be, it is not a reflection on the probity or otherwise of any individual Minister or Government to state that it is necessary and essential that there should be institutions and mechanisms in place so that the public can see what is happening.

There was an attempt to criticise this amendment, not by the Minister, by characterising it as proposing that every time NAMA opens a file, looks at a position on a particular site and makes an evaluation of an asset, the Minister would immediately press a button and put that information directly onto a website. Everybody understands the realities of what needs to be done and the detail of the work that must be engaged in.

While that is one end of the spectrum, the other end of it is a concern I would have that there would be no information available to the public as it is happening. I am not suggesting that each file should be put up on the website. I am suggesting that over a period of time - whatever is appropriate in terms of weeks or months - there should be an opportunity for the public to be served in this way by a mechanism or a reliable body or committee. I am not stuck on the particular proposal of my party for an oversight committee, but it should be something of that nature.

I appreciate the point the Minister made in the other House. One needs to differentiate between accountability and the slightly softer idea of transparency and the communication of information. They are related but are not necessarily the same. The Fine Gael amendment, amendment No. 2, which is a sensible one, deals with the question of an Oireachtas committee on NAMA. It is a reasonable attempt to set out the basis for a committee that would work within these Houses, and I support it.

However, with my party's amendment I am looking for something perhaps less onerous in some ways in terms of the kinds of institutional supports that it would need, but a means by which there can be an interlocutor between the public and what is happening in NAMA.

It seems to me that a body such as an oversight committee has certainly worked well in other countries, particularly the US, where persons who have an expertise and a knowledge, and who are not necessarily politically aligned but who have a credibility in the eyes of the public, would be in a position to query, examine, scrutinise and, most important of all, communicate information to the public by means of all of the different new available methods of communication and broadcasting.

I suppose it is one more attempt to try to avoid us being ever in the same position again where people are not only horrified at what has happened but appalled that it would appear nobody was examining or scrutinising what was occurring.

One requires oversight at all times, not only when there is a problem. There is a sense that such committees are tedious and go through the motions, but it is important in any democracy that there should be a group of people dedicated to examining and communicating the nuts and bolts of something as important as an institution such as NAMA. The amendment, in that context, should commend itself to the Minister.

When one looks back at the history of the crash of 1929 which went into the 1930s in the United States, for example, the striking aspect is the level of scrutiny that was engaged in at that time, 70 years ago. In fact, during that period there was a position taken, even by the political establishment in the United States, that if one was to persuade the public to "buy-in", to use that awful phrase, to steps one wanted to take for the future with which people were particularly enamoured, one needed people to have a means by which they could see and understand what had happened to bring them to the position in which they were. Colm McCarthy has made the point somewhat critically of the Government. I do not know if the Government ever responded to him on that specific point, namely, that he felt that in the context of the measures his committee was proposing, he thought it essential that there should be some quick means of having an examination into what happened in the Irish banking system in the past 10 years. He seems to be as horrified as everybody else at what occurred, and he seems to believe that in order to gain any kind of democratic support or confidence among the public for the harsh measures he is proposing - undoubtedly, harsh measures will be taken, whether his or variations of them - people need to have an understanding of what has occurred, and they need to have information. They should not just repeatedly hear the point: "We are the Government, trust us and we will make sure it will never happen again". The problem is that people just do not buy that.

The Taoiseach has used a particular phrase in recent days in answer to questions on the NAMA strategy, or perhaps it was said on his behalf. He said that we are putting NAMA in place and it is the strategy we have chosen on the basis of "the best advice available to us". It is a phrase the Taoiseach often uses, in particular when he is put under pressure in regard to what has happened to the economy more broadly. I believe he said it again on Sunday when he spoke about the mistakes made in the past ten years. However, while he says we took all the actions we took on the basis of the best economic advice available to us, people just do not buy that explanation any more.

Whether it is even true or false is not the point. Senator Boyle and the Minister, Deputy Gormley, have made the same point that there is a real and serious problem of public confidence in the Government and, sadly for the Minister, in the people who many of the public believe are at least partially responsible for bringing us to where we are at present. That is why we need these interlocutor-type mechanisms or institutions that people can have confidence in and rely on.

Perhaps a reasonable example to proffer to the Minister as to how it worked or might work was in regard to the Referendum Commission which oversaw the second Lisbon referendum, which occurs to me as I speak, though it may not be the best example. Many people said to me in the course of that debate that they felt Mr. Justice Clarke in his radio appearances impressed them due to his absolute clarity but also due to his fairness and sense of balance. He was not somebody who sounded as if he had an agenda. That would not be his job, of course, but he came across as a genuine representative of the public and one who could navigate the problem.

Very often two people on opposite sides of an argument invoke the same facts in support of their arguments - one could take the example of nationalisation versus NAMA. The Minister yesterday said that nationalisation would not deal with the credit flow issue. I turn to the Minister and say that NAMA does not deal with the credit flow issue. They are both suggestions as to how to cope with the banking crisis, as a consequence of which it would be intended and hoped that credit would start to flow, but one cannot make the claim that NAMA will guarantee credit flow any more than one can make the claim that nationalisation would, or vice versa, because there are so many uncertainties.

The Minister is reading something else, so he cannot be expected to-----