Joe O'Toole (Independent)

I thought that, so I will say "Ditto to that".

I thank the Leader of the House as I spoke to him on a number of occasions over the weekend with regard to including the extra debate today on the economic situation. I appreciate its inclusion and on this basis I will support the Order of Business today.

The Nyberg report was presented to us yesterday, but we will not have the opportunity to discuss it in the House. Will the Leader give some consideration to the outcomes and how we respond to it? Nyberg has more or less stated that we were all part of it. Let somebody stand up and deny it and we can listen to it. I am absolutely taken aback by the response of the Government, which is to establish a committee or committees of the House to further investigate what happened over the past four, five or six years. This is not what democracy is about. This is an example of the spoils going to the victors; it is now in charge after winning the election and will wheel these people in to get to the bottom of it. There is no getting to the bottom of it. We have the facts in front of us and, unlike the Bourbons, perhaps we will learn something from them. Perhaps we will forget some of it also, it if that is what is required of us. Let us not move into a situation in which we wonder if this is the inquisitions of the middle ages or the show trials of Stalin, where people were wheeled in from the gate and put up for questioning with no appreciable objective being found at the end of the day. It is not part of our function to do this. We need to refocus our democracy and recast our community. We need to refocus on what our objective might be, on a fairer society, and we need to redesign our society in favour of the common good. Let us not get distracted into five years of idle chatter in committee rooms where we have blame-shifting and a tortuous talking shop on what happened, who caused what and when, and when Ireland was invaded. There is no answer to the questions we want answered. It is like a truth commission. Let us take Nyberg as a truth commission. He has told us the truth about ourselves. We might not like it but it is there. It is the function of democracy to move on from there, to improve society on the basis of what he has told us, not to direct us for five more years to try to find out more. What more is there to know? We have seen it all. It is all there for us. We have a democratic responsibility to represent our people and help them to progress. Spending five more years looking at that is not the way forward.

I welcome the Nyberg report, even if I do not feel good about it. None of us can feel good about it. We all took some part in what happened over the past five or six years. When I say "all of us" I mean all of us in any position of authority, not every citizen. As public representatives, no matter what role we had, we played our part in it. It is a bit much to hear some of the people who were championing and giving full pages of newspapers to outline what great heros these leaders of the boom were, now in the same newspapers and perhaps on television telling us how bad these people really were. The reality is that there are lessons to be learned. Let us acknowledge that and move on democratically.