Banking inquiry ‘must not have an impact on cases before the courts’, Dáil told

The Dáil last night debated the proposed Oireachtas banking inquiry and agreed to new structures for the holding of such an investigation.

Government chief whip Paul Kehoe insisted that "such an inquiry must not have an impact on cases before the courts".

He said: “It must focus on issues surrounding the economic collapse that have never been fully explored and establish the facts. Any banking inquiry will need to be split into a number of modules on the basis of very strict terms of reference.”

Those who made the decisions that led to the economic collapse “must come before the elected representatives of the people of Ireland. It is important for the people to hear directly from those who made the decisions which brought about the economic collapse about why they acted as they did.”

He said the Committee on Procedure and Privileges would consider any issue of bias and could make recommendations to the Dáil on whether bias existed. “It is a matter for the Dáil to remove any member from the inquiry if bias exists.”

Labour chief whip Emmet Stagg said the people "deserve to know what happened in the Irish banking system in the run-up to the economic crisis and before the introduction of the disastrous 2008 blanket bank guarantee".

He added: “Many issues surrounding the economic collapse have never been fully explored. We need to establish the facts of what happened.”

Mr Stagg said the timing of the new banking inquiry had been queried, “but there is no big conspiracy theory here. If the proposed referendum had passed in October 2011, this banking inquiry would have been established over a year ago.”

Fianna Fáil's Billy Kelleher, however, said the procedure to establish a new form of inquiry was a way to "circumvent" the electorate's decision in a referendum not to extend the powers of committees to investigate matters of public interest.

“It is to try to establish some form of inquiry by amending standing orders in the pretence that it will be non-political.”

However, the Cork North Central TD added: “I have yet to come into this chamber when it was not political. I expect it to be because it is a political chamber. We have an adversarial democracy.”

Mr Kelleher predicted that “we will be back and forth to the Four Courts time and again because people’s good names will be taken prior to any findings”.

He pointed to the Public Accounts Committee, which, he said, was last week “undermined by some of its own members pirouetting before microphones in an attempt at one-upmanship”.

He also asked if the chief whip was “living in a fantasy world” to say the Committee on Procedure and Privileges would decide on the issue of objective bias and the membership of the committees.

Sinn Féin’s Aengus Ó Snodaigh said it would be “very difficult to find deputies who have not spoken about the banking crisis, including who caused it and who did not. If they have not spoken on it at this stage, I do not believe they are doing their job and I do not believe they are doing their constituents a service.”

He added that every party represented in the Dáil and Seanad “has made a comment and we are associated with those comments. However, that should not prevent us from sitting on a committee of inquiry”.