Paddy Burke (Fine Gael)

I welcome the Minister of State and I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to the debate. I wish the Minister for Finance the best with his illness but I am disappointed he is not present.

Senator Donohoe put his finger on it when he said there should be a great deal of straight talking. One wonders about all the fuss over a banking inquiry and how sophisticated it needs to be. I am most disappointed by the Government's attitude. It is an indictment of the Government parties that an Oireachtas joint committee is unable to conduct the investigation. When one considers the investigatory work done by Dáil committees over the years, one has to wonder why the Government is taking this position. Oireachtas Members lead the country and the Government is saying Members who are elected to run the country are not able to carry out an investigation into what went wrong in our banking system. It is a shocking indictment of the Government parties that they would say that about themselves, given they have a majority on parliamentary committees. The Taoiseach is saying his own colleagues in this House are not capable of carrying out an inquiry into the banking system.

Such an inquiry should be simple. Not many questions have to be answered or conclusions reached. Government parties did not listen to what people were saying over recent years. Many Members, during debates, referred to 100% and 120% mortgages and the Government did nothing about them. It was crazy that people could take out a mortgage to buy and furnish their houses and to buy one or two cars. The bankers knew what was happening and the Government must have known as well. It would not take much organisation to bring in the previous regulators and ask them why they did not do something about this and why, when Anglo Irish Bank's loan book went bananas during the final few years of the bubble, they did not act. That is unbelievable and I cannot understand why the Minister of State said the Governor of the Central Bank pointed out that elected Members who run the country would not be capable of carrying out this investigation into the banking fiasco of recent years. That is an unbelievable comment. If I was a member of a Government party, I would take issue with these comments at a parliamentary party meeting.

The Government failed in its duty. The McCarthy report clearly illustrates how Exchequer finances went out of control from 2003 onwards. The spending gap widened and surely the Department of Finance saw this. Officials should have done something about it but, to bridge the gap, the construction boom was fuelled by repealing section 23 tax breaks. There were many section 23 developments in counties along the Shannon basin such as Roscommon, Leitrim and Longford which are in trouble now. Longford featured on "The Frontline" last night and the problems that have resulted were highlighted. These developments were built in many other towns and tax breaks were provided for the building of hotels and car parks. The Government closed off section 23 by saying builders who had planning permission had to complete their work by 31 December 2006. There was a race to finish which put pressure on all sectors of the construction industry because workers were scarce. This drove prices higher and fuelled the bubble. The Department of Finance should have known this would happen. It would not be difficult to ask officials in the Department why they abolished that tax break in 2006. A general election was pending and the Government wanted to take in additional revenue to keep the coffers full and to ensure the gap in expenditure would not widen. The officials involved are still in place and they know what happened. They were culpable in all this. They were part of the problem.

These simple questions could be asked by an Oireachtas committee. It would not take long, following the appointment of a wise man, to find out what happened. I do not know which wise man or woman will be appointed to head up the Government inquiry but I presume if it was four or five years ago, the wise man would probably have been Seán Fitzpatrick and the wise woman would have been Gillian Bowler. I do not know who will be the wise man or woman on this occasion. Many wise men were interviewed on television during the boom and they all had their own view. The people want to know immediately what happened because they are suffering. Bank managers are calling them up to ask them to pay their loans where they have lost their jobs. Ordinary people, for whom I have much sympathy, are experiencing great hardship. 8 o'clock

If a simple investigative committee was put in place, it would ask plenty of questions and would, more than likely, get some of the answers in a short period of time with little cost to the Exchequer.