THE MORE information the people had about the economic crisis, the sooner they would get rid of Fianna Fáil “and hopefully elect our first Labour taoiseach”, Joan Burton said last night.
At the national conference of Labour Youth in Dublin, the party’s finance spokeswoman said: “The Labour Party is on the march and we really have something to offer. We’re trying to build a new movement, a fairer country, a country where, in our politics, we have as many women involved in politics as we have men.”
Urging a clean-up of the financial sector, she said: “We need to have an absolutely gold-plated, gilt-edged quality of financial regulation. We can’t afford any more scandals like the reinsurance scandals that happened in Ireland two to three years ago, but which received almost no coverage in the public press. We have to have a strong ethical framework.”
She said the tribunals in recent years had reflected a country where “the level of ‘buddy’ connections in business is so strong that it undermines a basic framework of corporate responsibility and reporting, and a wider social responsibility. And, in a way, that is what has brought our banks down. Anglo Irish Bank was the developers’ bank; Fianna Fáil was the developers’ party.
“And so you had a situation where the developers’ bank supported the developers, the developers supported Fianna Fáil, and Fianna Fáil, in turn, supported Anglo by turning a blind eye to what was absolutely excessively risky and outrageous behaviour and, once the international financial markets changed, its form of business model became a bust,” Ms Burton said.
The conference continues today at the Mansion House.