Noonan accuses banks of lying to Dáil and public

IF LYING was an Olympic sport, Ireland could put out a team of bankers who would win gold, former Fine Gael leader Michael Noonan told the Dáil.

He said that in introducing the Nama legislation, Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan was relying on information provided by the banks and the regulatory authorities.

“Without putting a tooth in it, the banks have misled this House, the banks have misled the Irish public, the banks have misled their shareholders, the banks have misled the Minister and the Government over an 18-month period.

“How many times have we seen senior bankers coming out saying that there was no problem in the Irish banks . . . that they had no toxic loans . . . no bad loans . . . we do not want private equity . . . we have all the equity we want?

“Go back over the quotations for the 12 months. Time after time, we have had these assurances from the banks.”

Mr Noonan said the biggest problem was the tardiness of Government decision-making.

Since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the US authorities intervened and rescued the banks they wished to rescue, to the degree that they were trading profitably now and had paid back much of the money they received.

“In addition, it is worth noting that there are 42 bankers in jail in the United States who were there within the past 12 months,” he added. “Yet we are still wondering what we will do to resolve the banking crisis, which, I believe, is an absolute prerequisite to resolving the economic crisis.”

Mr Noonan said the slowness of the decision-making process on the part of the Government and the public service presented a credibility issue. The question was whether the people, in politics and the public service, were up to it. Many people would suggest that they were not.

Joanna Tuffy (Labour, Dublin Mid West) said it was disappointing that the majority of the media seemed to be buying the same economic philosophy, that Nama was necessary and that the proposals contained in the Commission on Taxation and the McCarthy report should be implemented.

“That is what I interpreted from The Irish Times editorial, which suggested that the Government would be lily-livered if it did not implement the recommendations of the commission on taxation.”

Ms Tuffy said the editorials in The Irish Times and the Irish Independent were out of step with the public mood.

Michael Ahern (FF, Cork East) said that while the Opposition had a duty to ask the hard questions, it was clearly not interested in the answers. “It is doing a massive disservice to the nation in this approach,” he added.

“The continuous emphasis in its approach to Nama, in stating that the agency is out to save the bankers and developers, is cynical and untrue.” The implication was that the bankers were friends of Fianna Fáil. One only had to look at the party affiliations of some senior board members of the main banks to see that such an argument did not hold water.