DETAILS of two crucial meetings between bankers and government officials that led to the €440 billion bank guarantee being introduced in 2008 will be published, the government has promised.
A spokesman for the Labour party said minutes of the meetings on September 29, 2008 will be released when an investigation into the banking crisis begins.
“The commitment made in the Programme for Government is to establish an inquiry into the circumstances leading to the collapse of the banking system,” he said. “It will be a public inquiry, and we would envisage it will operate very like the Dirt Inquiry.” This was a short investigation by the public accounts committee in 1999 into non-payment of Deposit Interest Retention Tax (Dirt). ] The Labour spokesman was unsure whether minutes of the meetings exist. “We asked Brian Cowen [the former taoiseach] for them on a number of occasions during the last Dail and he told us there were no minutes,” he said. “But any information that exists that is relevant to that night would come before the [investigating] committee and in that way be released to the public.”
The Sunday Times has established that two memos relating to the decision do exist. Last year, following a request under the Freedom of Information act, Emily O’Reilly, the information commissioner, ruled that the records should not be released. O’Reilly’s decision covered two “hurriedly written” and contemporaneous handwritten accounts of what was said at the meetings.
She rejected advice from Seán Garvey, a senior investigator in the Office of the Information Commissioner, who recommended that the documents be released because of strong public interest. In his preliminary finding on a submission from the Department of Finance that the information from the banks was “given in confidence”, Garvey wrote: “The public interest in the department being held to account for its decision to commit billions of euro to the banking sector in the context of the guarantee would outweigh any damage to confidentiality in its dealings with the sector.”
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O’Reilly’s decision was a victory for the Department of Finance, which had fought a 14-month battle against releasing documents related to the bank guarantee. It warned that it would take high court action to prevent the release. AIB and Bank of Ireland also opposed their release.
The bank inquiry set up by the last government did not examine political decisions made about the guarantee at meetings in September 2008.
Before the election Joan Burton, Labour’s former finance spokesperson, said she believed there should be a “truth process” during which the public was told exactly what happened on the night of the guarantee. “One of the reasons that people find it difficult to move on from the banking crisis is because we still don’t know why the decision was made to guarantee the banks,” she said. “We need to know who the taoiseach met on that night, who he spoke to on the phone, and was he in contact with Europe?”
The first memo, refused by O’Reilly, relates to a meeting between Cowen, Brian Lenihan, the then finance minister, Paul Gallagher, the then attorney general, senior department officials and management from the Central Bank of Ireland and the Financial Regulator.
The second memo records the meeting involving the same state officials with senior management from AIB and Bank of Ireland.