David Norris (Independent)

I have one theme today, that is, whistleblowing. I congratulate the Government on ensuring our ambassador to Norway, Mr. Gary Ansbro, attended the Nobel peace prize ceremony to honour to Liu Xiaobo, who is a whistleblower about human rights in China.

I fully support Mr. Julian Assange, the organiser of WikiLeaks. It is extraordinary that his reputation has been impugned in the way it has and that he has been convicted by the Australian Prime Minister without a trial. This is quite extraordinary behaviour. Senior American officials have called for his assassination. The more open our government and the more dirty little secrets that are out in the open, the better.

The same is true of the banks in that there is whistleblowing involved in this sector also. Thanks to a whistleblower, The Irish Times tells us that, far from being compelled to pay the bonuses, the banks organised their own contract in a rushed fashion. They front-loaded it and brought forward the contract. They gave verbal contracts. Everyone in the bank apparently knew this was being done to outwit the Irish people and to perpetrate a fraud on them. The officials involved in the banks should be discerned and dismissed. We should know who they are and they should be got rid of straight away.

With regard to home carers, the same issue arises. I raised this a year ago on foot of a case involving an elderly woman in the north-eastern part of this country. There were disastrous circumstances in which the carers were entrusted with giving medication and did not even speak English. They had never been investigated by the Garda and there was no regulation whatever. The people who informed me about this were afraid to get involved themselves because they were afraid they would be punished by the authorities.

Mr. Noel Wardick of the Irish Red Cross was punished and lost his job because he told the truth about money being sequestered and left idle in rural branch of a bank. My own whistleblower, who gave me information that led to the disclosure of a very serious breach of liquidity regulations in the Irish Financial Services Centre, has lost his job.

There is a common theme today. There is a need to honour and protect whistleblowers because of the good they do for us and the way in which they place us in circumstances in which we can enact the kinds of principles we are elected to enact.