Sean Barrett (Independent)

I welcome the Minister. I support what Senator Clune said. Ultimately, we need a banking system in this country that will take on the role the Minister has had to take on today. All the evidence shows that in the period of massive lending between 1998 and 2008 hardly any of money lent from our financial institutions went into the manufacturing industry or the agricultural sector. Rather there was a spending splurge based on property and financial intermediation. In the Minister for Finance's discussions with Governor of the Central Bank, Professor Honohan, it was stated that we need at some stage to reinvent the banking system so it will perform the normal functions which banks perform in promoting enterprise. The banks undoubtedly lost the plot over that ten-year period and we need an early warning system to make sure that there is no question of a recurrence of that.

I thought during that dreadful period that there was a rationale for having the Industrial Credit Corporation and the Agricultural Credit Corporation. They were both privatised but they performed from the 1930s when the banking system was similarly reluctant to invest in industry. We need serious reform of the banks. They had lost touch with important sectors of the Irish economy. We should try to entice them to have regard for that. There was evidence from Bloxhams that foreign banks in Ireland played a much bigger role in funding manufacturing industry than the home grown banks. The banks may have lost the skills to do that and may not know anything about manufacturing industry or technology, but part of their duty as institutions, into which we put €64 billion, is that they had better acquire those skills again, perhaps play less golf with builders and get involved in the sectors that the Minister has brought before us. I commend the Bill.