HUMBERT SCHOOL:FINE GAEL is to oppose Nama legislation when it is presented to the Dáil in coming weeks, party leader Enda Kenny has said.
“Fine Gael cannot support Nama. We will vote against the Nama legislation when it comes before the Dáil next month,” he told the Humbert school in Ballina yesterday.
At the same event, Labour Party deputy leader and finance spokeswoman Joan Burton described section 58 of the Nama Bill, which sets out the rules for valuing bank loans, as “a shoddy piece of work that does no credit to the Minister [for Finance Brian Lenihan].”
To allow it to stand was “to abandon the legislative role of the TD and to install a Cowen-Lenihan parliamentary dictatorship that is allowed rule by decree without scrutiny or amendment”, she said.
Fianna Fáil Minister for Labour Affairs Dara Calleary said that a preliminary report from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) last June “endorsed the notion of Nama, though it had criticisms about it”. He also pointed out that the valuation process under Nama would be “subject to EU approval”, and that the office of the Comptroller and Auditor General would have oversight over it. “It [the valuation process] is not a Fianna Fáil project,” he said.
Mr Kenny said “the whole Nama gamble is fundamentally unfair and unwise. It transfers responsibility for dealing with toxic loans from the banks who made them, and the investors who funded them, to the Irish taxpayer. Many professional investors that fuelled the crisis by recklessly giving tens of billion of euros to the banks without proper due diligence could walk away scot-free at the expense of the taxpayer.”
His party instead favoured setting up “a good bank”, with a credit facility of up to €20 billion. This “National Recovery Bank” would have no toxic assets and so could lend to small businesses at reasonable rates, he said.
Fine Gael would also nationalise banks that, by September 2010, when the current Government guarantee ends, had failed to strengthen their balance sheets. Bad assets would then be removed from such banks and be placed in a completely separate property management company, he said.
“This would not be owned by the taxpayers, like Nama, but by existing investors and bondholders. The banks, freed of their bad assets and the claims of their bondholders, would then trade as normal, with little or no impact on their retail customers or employees,” he said.
Ms Burton said that “the evidence remains overwhelming that nationalisation [of the banks] remains the safest policy, as it does not require early valuations to be placed on the transfer of loans which would be between different public bodies”.
Fine Gael Senator Eugene Regan said “a vote for Nama is a vote to bankrupt the State”. He too would be opposing Nama legislation next month, he said, adding that the delay in its introduction meant it had been overtaken by events in the courts concerning the Liam Carroll companies.
Mr Kenny also criticised a recommendation in the McCarthy report to cut the number of local authorities in the State from 34 to 22. Describing it as “misguided”, he said “county identity is an important feature of Irish political life and a source of political legitimacy. We must protect . . . local democracy, not undermine it.”
Ms Burton said the Seanad “costs too much” and its expenses were far higher than for TDs. She had “an open mind” on the need for two Houses of the Oireachtas.