Michael McCarthy (Labour)

I begin by also congratulation Senator Paschal Mooney on his re-election to this House. I served with him in the previous Seanad and he was a very hard-working and sincere Senator. I wish him and his wife well. Our thoughts are not far away from the late Senator Peter Callanan whose untimely death gave rise to this vacancy. We think of him today and in the future as we wish Senator Mooney the best.

I have two points to make. I believe the banking inquiry should be held in public and that the template to be used by the Government should be that of the DIRT inquiry where for a relatively short period an effective parliamentary committee was in place which yielded a dividend to the Exchequer in terms of money and also held people to account. It is not good enough to give the banks €54 billion and let them ride into the sunset, so to speak, while they evict young people from their houses and literally render generations homeless. This is after the recapitalisation and the bailout of the banks, which still hold thousands of young couples to ransom by locking them into fixed-term mortgage interest agreements. I know of one particular case where a young couple are paying an interest rate of 6.9% and the penalty to get out of that agreement is not affordable. All the while interest rates have been teetering around the zero rate. Such situations are pathetic.

As regards road funding, I believe the Minister for Transport, Deputy Dempsey, was short-sighted in announcing he was not going to allocate extra funding to local authorities in terms of restoring the roads to their normal levels before the frost, ice and flooding. The Government might consider one element which would enable local authorities to raise the much-needed finance themselves. While the licensing authority for cars and other vehicles such as tractors, buses, etc. in Cork is based in Cork County Hall, all moneys collected in Cork city and county go to the Exchequer. Cork County Council pays staff to collect the money locally, but it all goes to the Exchequer. I do not believe this is a good use of money, particularly when it is considered that the Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism, Deputy Martin Cullen, when Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, wasted €50 million on electronic voting machines. I believe local authorities need autonomy in terms of fund-raising and should be allowed to retain moneys collected at local level.