Paul Bradford (Fine Gael)

I am glad to have an opportunity to say a few words on this important subject. I look forward to hearing from the Government over the next few weeks a more fleshed out presentation of what the banking inquiry will comprise. I am at one with my colleagues in saying I hope and demand that it be as public and as transparent as possible. In the words of the old adage, not only does justice need to be done, but it must be seen to be done. There are many people out there who want to see hard questions asked of politicians, regulators and bankers in public so we can pin down the policy decisions that have brought us to our current state of economic chaos and by whom they were made.

We are in a state of economic chaos and we can only hope that from the embers of the Celtic tiger we will be in a position to achieve growth in the economy and rebuild the country. It will require a new type of politics and a new ethos in both public and economic life. I will repeat what I have said here many times over the last number of years: regrettably, greed took over our society from top to bottom. A person's standing in society was no longer related to the person's contribution to society or to their community but was based on an appalling flaunting of wealth and property. When the new culture of celebrity took over, with the back page of the Sunday Independent telling us whose birthday party took place where, and became more important than real news stories about public life, investment and job creation, we went down a very sad road. A whole new generation of people took over as the men and women to look up to, and we lost our values and sense of proportion. It is no wonder people were under enormous pressure to borrow money they could not afford to pay back and, shockingly, banks provided funding for the sort of lifestyles that could not be sustained.

When the banking inquiry concludes, the answers will not be surprising. Too much money was given out, improperly, to too many people for projects that were dreams rather than reality. However, we are where we are, as the cliché goes, and we must try to work our way out of here. It is to be hoped the inquiry will at least allow the Irish public some degree of satisfaction in terms of hard questions being asked and, more importantly, answered. From the top of our political and banking establishments to the bottom and from one regulatory body to another, there are profound questions to be asked.

The problem was the loss of proportion and the political choices that were made, particularly in the period from 1998-99 to 2001-02. In the 1977 election manifesto we probably saw the worst example of buying of votes through budgetary policy, and it was a disaster that brought the country to the verge of economic ruin. We thought we had learned from the experience, but there was a repeat of that sort of policy in the latter years of the 1990s and the early years of the new millennium. There are substantive political questions to be asked about the decision making process at that time. As Senator Donohoe said, there is a large body of evidence that in terms of our reliance on the property market, and from the points of view of taxation and job creation, we were going far down the wrong road, yet we continued with those policies.

I concede, from the perspective of those who are in politics, that it is often difficult to say "stop." If money is available to carry out projects which in the short term are seen to bring in taxes and create employment, demands that an alternative course be charted are not popular. There was not much protest from most sections of the political establishment, although a number of figures will stand out, to their eternal credit, for calling a spade a spade. My party colleague Deputy Richard Bruton, for example, was sound in his economic assessment.

The subjects of the policy decisions taken, the failure of the regulator and the broader policy on banking are worthy and demand the deepest possible level of investigation. As one or two of my colleagues have said, we are not looking for a witch hunt. If one reads the newspapers or listens to chat shows on the radio, there does appear to be a certain witch-hunt mentality, but that will not butter anyone's bread. We need a calm, reflective, yet thorough analysis of what went wrong.

It is obvious that the more public the inquiry, the better. I concede that for the benefit of the country it way well be necessary to do work relating to sensitive economic and banking information in private, but it is important to assure the public that the investigation will be thorough and complete while ensuring as much as possible of the inquiry will be held in public. We do not want a tribunal or committee that will take ten to 12 years to report.

I was a Member of the Lower House when tribunals were set up in the late 1990s with the expectation of an early conclusion. I saw an image of a much younger David McCullagh, the RTE political correspondent, on "The Week in Politics" last Sunday week. It was from the autumn of 1998 or 1999 and he was proclaiming that the Moriarty tribunal would complete its work by the following spring or summer. He was only a decade out. We are not seeking a tribunal of inquiry. A mechanism is needed which is much more precise, definitive and conclusive and which will allow the questions on people's minds to be asked clearly and precisely and as publicly as possible. For all our sakes, I hope the Government gets the balance right and that we learn from the political, economic and banking mistakes for which the country is paying a high price.