Banking inquiry report to be shorter than planned

The Oireachtas banking inquiry has agreed to halve the length of its final report in an effort to meet a January publication deadline.

The committee will produce a 250-300-page report focused solely on new information that emerged during the public hearings. It will now consist of 11 chapters focusing on issues that arose in the banks, the bank guarantee, the role of the European Central Bank and other factors in entering the bailout programme.

Fine Gael TD Eoghan Murphy and Labour Senator Susan O’Keeffe have until next Thursday to complete the revised report. Every member of the committee is being consulted on a daily basis about its drafting.

“This is a rescue mission. There is no doubt about that. There will be a report and that is the main thing,” one TD said. “Whether we can all reach agreement on the conclusions and the recommendations and. . . everyone will sign up to the report is the next hurdle.”

Fundamentally flawed

Members were forced to put in place a new team to finish the report amid frustrations the initial 750-page one was fundamentally flawed. Mr Murphy and Ms O’Keeffe are working with three legal representatives and the personal assistants of Fianna Fáil’s Michael McGrath and Sinn Féin’s

Pearse Doherty

. Ciarán Lynch, committee chairman, insisted the revised report will be worthy of time and money invested.

“Everybody worked very hard to get the draft report to where it actually was and that was never to be seen as the final product,” he said. The report will be issued to interested parties in the first week of December and they will have 14 days to respond. The intention remains to publish it by January 20th. It must be complete before the election is called or the inquiry’s work falls.

Mr Doherty said there were serious lessons to be learned. “In hindsight we should have done things differently. We always knew that we were under a huge time frame,” he said, adding that the delay in setting it up put the process at “huge risk”.

Socialist TD Joe Higgins has confirmed he will not sign the final report. It is understood the initial report made little or no reference to Anglo Irish Bank or Irish Nationwide Building Society in the chapter dealing with the bank guarantee.