Sean Barrett (Independent) | Oireachtas source

On Sunday last, advice on how to operate economic policy in this country was given to this House and the Government by the chief executive officer of Ulster Bank and the man who was head of Permanent TSB between 2007 and 2012. Both of these individuals are opposed to the deposit and loan-to-income ratios which the Governor of the Central Bank has proposed. The British Government owns an 81% stake in Ulster Bank, which effectively bankrupted itself at one point.

The chief executive of Ulster Bank, Mr. Jim Brown, who previously appeared before the Joint Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, is a very personable man. However, we must ask the question as to how he turned it from being a source of major finance for industrial development in the Belfast area at the turn of the century, into a bankrupt entity. Permanent TSB was heavily criticised in the Nyberg report, which indicated that it had the highest ratio of loans to deposits in the country and that at one point it was lending out over 275% of its deposits. This was a recipe for bankruptcy and we were eventually obliged to bail out that bank. We should debate issues but advice from bankrupt bankers on how we should run the country must surely come at a pretty heavy discount.

On the same topic, last Friday the Central Bank named the members of an 13-person inquiry charged with examining the position in respect of alleged rogue banks. Irish Nationwide is named as one of the latter. This will be a useful exercise and I wish the committee charged with carrying out the inquiry well. One could say - similar to the allegation sometimes made in respect of buses in Dublin - that we have waited six years for a banking inquiry and now two have come along at once. The work of the inquiry to which I refer will complement that being carried out by the relevant Oireachtas committee. It must be remembered that the Central Bank played quite a central role in the financial crisis because it was not doing its job when the latter arose. The Central Bank should come clean with regard to what on earth it thought it was doing between 2000 and 2008 when it was supposed to be regulating the banking sector.