Marie Louise O'Donnell (Independent)

I wish to share my time with the leader of the Independent group.

I welcome the Minister to the House. I compliment him on his work and congratulate him on the evident progress on banking debt and sovereign debt.

I want to ask some general questions and make some general observations. As I know very little about high finance and less about economics, I do so as a citizen who just happens to be a Senator. Since I knew what a bank was, what it does and how it does it, I knew greed was the driving factor. It is a given that banks must make profits, but it is greed, in interest rate, in the systems, in the directors and in the executives, that fuels the banks. They have beggared citizens and families. If they have not beggared them financially, they have certainly done what Paddy Kavanagh referred to as poverty - they beggared them in anxiety and in worry.

As another Senator mentioned, the interest rates in Britain and internationally have possibly been falsified. I would go so far as to say this is endemic across the banking world. I get the feeling - I do not know about other Senators - that we are living with a banking-incompetent state, not with a state, as the bankers would say, "going forward".

I have one or two simple questions for the Minister. Is it possible for the Minister for Finance to fine Ulster Bank €1 million a day for its incompetence? That would certainly get it working. Is it possible that he could set up a situation where the people of this island might leave an incompetent useless bank without penalty? The people of this island are trapped in banks that cannot and do not work and they are unable to move.

Is it also possible that he might be able to get rid of executives who are still in place and who are getting other jobs? Sometimes I think this is the only country in the world or certainly in Europe, whose bankers and ex-bankers who have cost the State millions of euro are seen in golf clubs, getting in and out of cars, or coming and going from expensive hotels as though laughing at the system.

Mr. Elderfield is a fine person who has made outstanding changes, under the Minister's direction, to banking in Ireland. Was he as successful, however, when he was in charge of vetting people? Are we back to the Patrick Neary days when it comes to Mr. Boucher and Mr. Murphy? Have they fooled Mr. Elderfield-----