Sean Barrett (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the inaugural flight yesterday to Ireland from St John's, Newfoundland. It is a new service that has been 90% booked for the season, with 16,000 people booking seats on the very first day that bookings opened. It reunites Waterford and its cultural heritage with Newfoundland. They have common music and the same kind of accents and so on. It brings people from Canada to Ireland without going by way of Heathrow. We should look at the possibility of opening up more direct routes, because going by way of Heathrow would mean four or five hours spent hanging around. The travel time between Newfoundland and Ireland was almost halved yesterday by not having to go via Heathrow.
I hope that the statements made by certain Ministers about the banking inquiry, talking about coups, stunts and strokes and so on, will be filed on the website Daft.ie. The idea that Senator Norris, Senator Cummins and Senator O'Donovan got together in some kind of conspiracy is absurd. This time tomorrow we will have our first meeting. We need to examine what bank boards were doing; what their auditors were doing; what the senior officials were doing; what the Central Bank which was supposed to be regulating the sector was doing; how much the EU intervened; whether there were design faults in the euro currency from the day we joined; why we did not look at the small print while Gordon Brown and his opposite numbers in Sweden and Denmark did; measures to prevent a recurrence; the cost; and why Canada, under its finance Minister, Jim Flaherty and Mark Carney as Governor of the Bank of Canada, managed to avoid both the banking crisis and a public finance crisis.

I thank the House for its unanimous endorsement of me as a member of the committee and we will take suggestions. After the ridiculous start, I am sure it will do valuable work for the country. I need assurance that we have made sufficient institutional changes to ensure such a crisis will not happen again. We need far stricter regulation of the financial sector and under the Chairman, Deputy Ciarán Lynch, I am sure we will proceed in that direction. We will try not to let the House down.