The Green Party has supported the suggestion by the author of the McCarthy report that an Oireachtas committee inquiry should be set up to examine failures in the banking system in the State.
Economist Colm McCarthy, lead author of the report of the special group on public service numbers and expenditure programmes delivered to Government last month, said yesterday a “Dirt-style” inquiry would greatly improve the public understanding of how banks had “got into this mess”.
In a statement today Green Party finance spokesman Dan Boyle said he agreed with Mr McCarthy’s opinion that the “general public still hasn’t had a thorough explanation of what went wrong with the Irish banking system”.
“The role of that our financial regulators played in the banking collapse will be examined in a different forum, and I have strong hopes that the ongoing investigations of the Director of Corporate Enforcement and others will lead to the prosecutions of those in the banking system that broke the law.”
Mr Boyle said there had been no opportunity as of yet for senior bankers – some of the best-paid people in society – to “account for the catastrophic failures in their organisations, for which we will all have to pay”.
He noted the Dáil and Seanad would, in the coming weeks, examine the legislation to establish the National Asset Management Agency (Nama).
“This is probably the most significant piece of legislation that this Government or any government in recent decades will have had to pass, and because of that there is genuine public concern – especially as some of the people who got us into this mess have yet to be called to account for their actions,” he said.
The Labour Party yesterday supported McMcCarthy’s call for the establishment of an Oireachtas inquiry into the failures of the banking system.
Michael Moynihan, the Fianna Fáil TD who chairs the all-party Oireachtas Committee on Economic Regulatory Affairs, said the committee would examine the proposal closely, but added that it had already been examining this possibility over the past few months.
“It would need to be deeper than the Dirt inquiry. It would have to look at how money was loaned, to whom it was given, why it was given and who called the shots. The question of the bonus system in the banks would also need to be looked at.”
The Dirt inquiry a decade ago focused on the evasion of Deposit Interest Retention Tax (Dirt) from its introduction in 1986 up to 1998. It found the practice was "large-scale, systematic and carried out over many years".