Liam Twomey (Fine Gael)

The words of Professor Patrick Honohan are listened to with great interest both in this country and abroad. At an Oireachtas committee meeting yesterday he made some telling remarks which are worthy of debate in this House. One of the most interesting remarks he made was about the difficulties encountered in finding a solution for householders in negative equity and struggling with huge personal debt. He is acknowledging something of which we are all aware. Finding a solution that people will believe is fair when householders are in negative equity and have huge personal debts and incomes are dropping will be very difficult. He remarked that it was wrong that large developers, the individuals who got us into the mess in the first place, seemed to be insulated - I am using his words - from the financial difficulties many others were experiencing. However, he also contradicted himself to a degree because he said wages were still too high and affecting competitiveness in the overall economy. When asked to comment on the banks, he made it clear that we should be pushing to sell all of our banks because it appeared the nationalisation of Allied Irish Banks would happen in the coming months because of the huge difficulties it was experiencing in raising funds. All of these issues warrant a proper debate in the House, especially when we consider what is happening in the bond markets, with interest rates exceeding a rate of well over 8% for ten year bonds and hitting 7.45% for three year bonds. We witnessed such erratic movement prior to experiencing other difficulties in our financial system in the past two years. If international investors are treating Ireland as a no-go zone, we should take the matter seriously. We should have a proper debate to discuss the reasons interest rates are increasing to these levels and the potential effect on the economy next year.

We should also have a debate in this House, with the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food present, to discuss what seemed to be an attempt to get rid of Ireland's sugar beet industry based on wrong information. It means the Government messed up on the sugar beet industry which was profitable and good for this country. It now seems we gave it away too easily. That warrants an urgent debate in the House.

I must mention the issue of passwords at Anglo Irish Bank. Perhaps the Minister could comment on whether these documents can be accessed only through the passwords of the individuals concerned. Would it be possible to bypass the passwords in some way, and can the necessary expertise be brought in to do this? Two years after we said we would deal with the financial mess that is Anglo Irish Bank, we are still running around the country looking for passwords, and this is making us a laughing stock across the world.