Banking Sector
Dail Éireann — 2026-05-26
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Pearse Doherty (SF), Donegal

I appreciate what the Tánaiste has put on the record, that there was a reduction from €7.7 billion to a figure over €6 billion in the period of a year. However, it does not matter if the total is €7.7 billion or €6 billion. The money is sitting there and not making any return. It is in Exchequer notes, which means that the State is paying another organ of the State the 1%. It is making no return. It is financial mismanagement, on top of the fact that the Government sold the shares at one of the worst times. These shares would have been worth twice what we got for them if the Government held them today. We would be getting hundreds of millions of euro in dividends. This is serious financial mismanagement that the Comptroller and Auditor General should be exploring. We are not talking about hundreds of millions, or hundreds of thousands wasted on a bike shed or the €50 million wasted on the Irish Rail IT project. We are talking about billions of euro that has gone amiss as a result of selling the shares in AIB at the wrong time and then putting the proceeds from the sale of those shares in a fund that gets absolutely no return when inflation is running at 3.7%.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-05-26/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:04+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-05-26