Bank bailout and austerity
Deputy Boyd Barrett accused the Taoiseach of rewriting the history of the bank bailout and the austerity that followed. The Tánaiste acknowledged the bailout, said the Taoiseach had misspoken, and clarified that shareholders, not bank owners generally, had not been bailed out.
Can I join you, a Cheann Comhairle, in extending best wishes for Christmas to everybody in the House, particularly to the service officers, the ushers and the Oireachtas staff for all their hard work in a difficult year.
It seems Christmas started early for the Taoiseach yesterday when he entered into a winter wonderland fairy tale where the bank bailout never happened and the €17 billion was never taken out of the pension reserve fund to bail out the banks. Neither was cruel hardship and austerity imposed on large numbers of people which resulted in a housing crisis and the massive understaffing of health service, of which we are still suffering the consequences.
The programme for Government has a shared future. Does that extend to a shared acknowledgement of the past reality that people have suffered and the reality of the bank bailout? Will the Tánaiste correct the Dáil record to show that there was in fact a bail out of the banks-----
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-----and that it cost the people of this country very dearly?
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There was a bailout of the banks 12 years ago. The Taoiseach misspoke yesterday. He said that himself this morning. In fairness, he corrected himself quickly in the Dáil yesterday. What he meant to say was that the banks' owners, the banks' shareholders, were not bailed out. Those who owned the banks and those who had shares in the banks lost all, or almost all, of their money. Some were very wealthy people; some were not. Some were just everyday people who bought bank shares as part of their pension. We need to bear that in mind.
The banks were effectively nationalised. Sometimes what happens when one is a Minister or in politics is that people say to one that they would like their sector bailed out like the banks were. What they often do not appreciate is that would mean the State would seek to own that sector. For example, if we were to bail out the fishing industry, like the banks were bailed out, we would become the proud owner of all of those boats. If we were to bail out the farming sector, like the banks were bailed out, we would become the owner of all of those farms.