The upcoming National Asset Management Agency (Nama) Bill will be a "criticial test" of the State's political institutions, The Labour's Party's finance spokeswoman Joan Burton said today.
Addressing the Humbert Summer School in Ballina, Co Mayo, Ms Burton said: "I wish I could say to you here that every clause will be scrutinised with care. That is unlikely. Take the bank guarantee. I recall going for a briefing to the Department of Finance. I suggested a few amendments that might impose some limits on taxpayer exposure only to be told that the Government would not accept any amendment.
"The role of the Dáil was to rubber-stamp the Bill and no other. It would be intolerable if that same attitude prevailed next month."
Ms Burton said the Bill rested on Section 58, which sets out the rules for valuing the bank loans, and labelled this "a shoddy piece of work that does no credit to the Minister".
"It could hardly be otherwise as Brian Lenihan is attempting, like Janus of the ancient Roman myth, to show two faces to the world looking in opposite directions." Ms Burton said Mr Lenihan on the one hand had to insist on the protection of the public interest but accused him of presenting another face through a second basis of valuation of property contained in Section 58 of the legislation.
She said the "potentially bogus concept" of long term economic value was the "convenient cover he and Mr Cowen use for a policy to pay way over the odds for the banks' dodgiest loans on the pretext that the assets so acquired have an enduring value that is not reflected in the current market".
"That is political and economic mumbo jumbo.
"I cannot believe that Dáil Éireann will pass so flawed a clause as section 58," Ms Burton said. "Surely there are Cabinet Ministers who have qualms. Surely there are FF and Green backbenchers who will baulk at the shocking abdication of public interest that is inherent in Section 58. This is the coming test of our parliamentary institutions: To fight or to abdicate on Section 58.
"To abdicate responsibility and to allow this clause to stand is to abandon the legislative role of the TD and to install a Cowen-Lenihan parliamentary dictatorship that is allowed to rule by decree without scrutiny or amendment."
Recalling Shelley's poem Ozymandias, Ms Burton told her audience that Nama will stand as a monument to greed. "Ireland is today littered with monuments to similar folly and the delusions of the past decade. As part of the Nama process we are likely to take into public ownership many properties, hotels, apartment blocks and office blocks of little or no value.
"Perhaps Nama will choose to hold on to some and erect a plaque to remind a future generation of the greed that created the situation we now face with the Nama Bill."
The Labour frontbencher also called for the "secret world" of political lobbying to be examined, and for the introduction of a register of lobbyists as a first step.
"We have had 12 years of tribunals and still we don't have a modern enforceable anti-corruption Law. . . . It beggars belief that this Government has done nothing to update the law on corruption, the penalties for corruption, the criminal procedures and the standard of proof required to secure conviction. Such a law, in my view, is a basic requirement of political reform."
In a separate speech at the summer school, Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny said his party will vote against the Nama legislation. Mr Kenny said the "unfair and unwise gamble" of Nama would see people's taxes used to "shore up a massive spending spree" by developers outside the State.
