LABOUR PARTY leader Eamon Gilmore has called on the Government to listen to the views of the 46 economists opposed to Nama, but Green Party Minister Eamon Ryan said they should have pointed out what was going wrong four or five years ago.
Mr Gilmore said the Government would be acting in "a totally reckless and irresponsible manner" if it ignored the criticism of Nama voiced by 46 leading economists and academics in The Irish Timesyesterday.
“It is clear from the volume of correspondence being received by TDs that there is huge public opposition to the Nama plan. It now seems evident from the statement signed by these 46 economists, representing a wide range of political and economic views, that a majority of economic experts are of a similar view,” said Mr Gilmore.
He said Labour shared the concern of the economists that the inevitable outcome of the Nama approach would be that the State will end up paying grossly over the market value for loans and in the process tie a financial millstone to future generations of taxpayers.
“It appears that such is the ideological opposition of Fianna Fáil to the temporary nationalisation of the key banks, the logical alternative to the Nama plan, that they will take any other course, no matter how reckless, how dangerous and how expensive to the Irish taxpayers,” said Mr Gilmore.
He added that it was now time for the Green Party to get off the fence on what was the most crucial economic issue to have faced the Irish people for a generation.
“The Greens are attempting to speak out of both sides of their mouths. On Monday, Senator Dan Boyle said that Green Party votes in the Dáil could not be taken for granted on Nama, while today Green Party Minister Eamon Ryan effectively endorsed the Nama plan.
“The Irish public is entitled to expect a little more political honesty from the Green Party,” said Mr Gilmore.
Mr Ryan had earlier defended Nama and asked why the 46 economists opposed to it had not voiced concerns at economic policy some years ago. “They should have been there five years ago or four years ago when the real economic mistakes were being made in terms of a property bubble and a macro economic policy that actually should have been different.
“I wish they’d actually come out at that time and said that we need to be doing things differently,” said Mr Ryan.
Speaking before the first Cabinet meeting after the August break, Mr Ryan insisted the price it would pay the banks for speculative loans would be “massively discounted”. He said the Green Party was working to improve the legislation. “Obviously it is a draft, it’s not finalised, so we can further improve it and that’s what the Green Party are insisting on – and that’s why we are in government.”
Mr Ryan said developers, speculators and bankers would pay for Nama. “The taxpayers’ job in this is not to bail them out, is not to provide any support to speculative decisions that were wrong,” he told RTÉ.
“Our job is to get the economy working again and we have, with the assistance of the European Central Bank, the mechanism with which we can do that.”
Mr Ryan denied that Nama would be funded by cutbacks in the public services. “There’s so much commentary [that] we’re taking money from our schools budget, our health budget – we’re not,” he said.
“We have access to funding from the European Central Bank which we can use in an intelligent way to work out that position that developed in recent years. But the first people to pay will be those speculators or developers or bankers who actually made the wrong call,” said Mr Ryan.
Fine Gael TD Alan Shatter described Mr Ryan’s comments as “astonishing”, saying that as a member of Cabinet he had ample opportunity for a direct input into the draft Bill before its publication.
“The Minister claims the Green Party is now insisting that changes be made to the Nama Bill. He should publicly detail those changes. He should also explain why both he and Minister Gormley did not ensure that these defects were acknowledged and remedied when sitting around the Cabinet table just over a month ago,” said Mr Shatter.
