The Minister's speech has received a very easy ride in the press so far. When people have had time to study it, however, the reaction may be considerably different. The Minister traded on a few facile, basic premises, one of which was that shares go up and shares go down and that she could not be held responsible for the vagaries of the market. She was right, but in this case we start from a fixed price, a price fixed, according to Mr. Alfie Kane, by the Minister after huge mind-boggling sums of money had been spent on advising her and others surrounding the flotation of Telecom Éircom. The result is that hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens who dabbled in shares for the first time have got their fingers burnt. It seems that these people were entitled to rely on the very expensive advice that the Minister received and on her own manifest enthusiasm for the flotation.
My colleague, Deputy O'Shea, drew attention to the amazing amount of money – £40 million – included in the original Book of Estimates for a panoply of advisers for advice surrounding the flotation. A Supplementary Estimate had to be introduced to provide for the payment of a further £40 million, giving a total of £80 million. In terms of this being a lesson for the future the question has to be raised as to whether advisers had a vested interest given that they were on a percentage for the second £40 million.
What price was agreed by the Minister when the sum of £40 million was included in the original Book of Estimates? This sum could not have been provided for unless the Minister had a price in her head. We do not know what the figure is but it appears that the advisers had a vested interest in the revaluation of the original price—