Independent TD for Kildare North Catherine Murphy

“The Minister, Deputy [Michael]Noonan, stated that what happened must never happen again and that the Government could not get back the €34 billion put into Anglo Irish Bank, but the Government did not ask for it.

It is criminal that people are still paying for it. It is as if we took on the mortgage of the big house up the road, subsequently restructured it and were singing the restructuring’s praises because we no longer had to pay as much as we believed we would.

This is the spin, but we are still paying every penny of it as well as the interest. In response to a parliamentary question, the Minister told me: “The schedule for extinguishing the balance will be €500 million in 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018.” On 23 December, the first €500 million was borrowed and burned. He continued: “That will rise to €1 billion in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023. It will double again to €2 billion” per year from 2024 onwards until it is paid, which looks to be in 2034.

“I am coming to a point about the relationship between this and that awful night when we turned the IOU into a sovereign bond. We have no way of knowing what the relationship was between IBRC and the Department of Finance on that night. In the Chamber, the Minister talked in glowing terms about IBRC’s board and chief executive and IBRC was only being wound down so quickly for one reason.

However, we were not told what the relationship was. This issue needs to be addressed in the House. Why was there a sudden urgency to liquidate IBRC? Was there even a relationship? Not even the senior management knew. Remember how Mr. Alan Dukes was told that afternoon; we saw it on Twitter.

The question of the relationship is important. Many issues like that arise. According to Mr. John Moran’s diary, he met Mr. Mike Aynsley on 1 and 2 August, but there are no notes from that high level meeting. How could it be that two days of meetings were held between the most senior people in the Department of Finance and IBRC and not even one note was kept?

“Turning again to the big guys as opposed to the small guys, Mr Denis O’Brien owed IBRC millions of euro. If he had a spare €45 million lying around, why was he not asked to use it to pay down his borrowings instead of using it to purchase a company that we have been told was a bit of a basket case? Why would the bank allow someone in such debt to use €45 million to expose himself further or did he know that Siteserv would quickly turn into something profitable?”

“The inquiry by KPMG relates to this debate. If we are to have hope for the future, we need to do things differently in terms of governance. We cannot ask the same people who were part of a deal to review that deal. It will not wash.

The public knows this. I took great offence when the Taoiseach yesterday spoke about the accuracy of some of my questions and how they were written. It was beneath him and his office. He should correct that statement. There was nothing wrong with the questions I posed. What was wrong was that I was not getting answers. They had to be pulled out like hens’ teeth. This is unacceptable.”

I am concerned by section 31(2)(b) of the Freedom of Information Act 2014. Under it, where a member of the Judiciary is involved in a review or inquiry, freedom of information requests are out of bounds. It is important that this issue is not just pushed off into the future and buried until 31 August, right bang in the middle of the silly season.”

I am very hopeful about this country. The claim has been made on many occasions from the Government benches that those of us on this side of the House show no evidence of having hope. In fact, we do have hope, but we may well have a different vision for the type of Ireland we want to create.

This is an opportunity to acknowledge that we should not dismiss things that are positive. Indeed, both of the Ministers, Deputies Richard Bruton and Simon Coveney, who are in the Chamber have been very much at the heart of driving some of the positive improvement we have seen. It is only fair that we acknowledge that. However, we should not be codding ourselves about any of the issues or tolerating spin; our discussions must be real. The Government would do well to remember that the public is wide awake and engaged with all of this.”

Catherine Murphy TD in the Dáil yesterday