Green Party leader John Gormley is expected to meet Taoiseach Brian Cowen later today in a bid to defuse a growing row over whether an inquiry into the banking crisis should take place in public or not.
Differences between the coalition partners have emerged after Green Party members stressed that they believe any inquiry should not be held behind closed doors. The party is also adamant that the Dáil has to have a role in the inquiry.
Speaking on RTÉ's Morning Ireland earlier today, Green Party chairman and finance spokesman Senator Dan Boyle reiterated his party's belief that any inquiry should be open.
"It is certainly our hope that significant elements of it (the inquiry) will be in public. As far as the Green Party is concerned we believe that it needs to be open, needs to be time defined and needs to have Oireachtas involvement," he said.
However, Mr Boyle refused to say whether the party believed the former minister for finance and now Taoiseach Brian Cowen should be questioned by the inquiry team.
"Until we have terms of reference I'm not going to say what the order is or who can be questioned...obviously everyone who has been involved in this situation should be contributing to the process that has been agreed upon," he said.
A Government spokesman said yesterday that no final decision on the format of an inquiry had been made, but he pointed to comments from the Taoiseach in the past that it would be a very serious mistake to do anything that would jeopardise the steps taken in the last 16 months to restore stability to the banking system.
Government chief whip Pat Carey, speaking on The Week in Politics last night, took a similar line to the Taoiseach.
"There are a number of enquiries in place already, the office of director corporate enforcement and the Garda fraud squad and the financial regulator are involved in enquiries into Anglo Irish Bank for example. We must be absolutely certain we don’t prejudice any of the investigations that are currently underway," he said.
Opposition parties have demanded that any banking inquiry should be held in public.
Labour Party leader Eamon Gilmore said today it was essential that any inquiry held be conducted in public.
"It was decisions made behind closed doors that caused the crisis, in the first place. The pursuit of the truth must be done in the open," he said.
"Any attempt to hold this inquiry behind closed doors, with a few token public sessions, will not be acceptable to the Labour Party and will not be acceptable to the taxpayers who have been exposed to a potential risk of more than €400 billion as a result of the bank guarantee, who have had to cough up €11 billion so far to bail out the banks and who face an as yet unknown final bill," added Mr Gilmore.
His comments were echoed by party colleague Pat Rabbitte who said today It that it would entirely undermine the value of an inquiry into the banking crisis if it were held "in secret."
Fine Gael's enterprise spokesman Leo Varadkar said that any inquiry would have to include the Taoiseach as its "star witness," adding that Mr Cowen "has very serious questions to answer" about his role as minister for finance.
Elsewhere, the Irish Bank Officials’ Association (IBOA) has welcomed the growing cross-party support for a
comprehensive inquiry into what went wrong with the banking system.
The union’s general secretary, Larry Broderick, said that such an investigation should not only indicate the major shortcomings of policy and practice in the recent past but also highlight important lessons for the future.
“The banking crisis has resulted from a widespread systemic failure involving not just the financial institutions, themselves, but also the public agencies charged with their supervision and regulation and indeed the political framework within which those supervisory agencies were established,” said Mr Broderick.
“We need a broadly-based inquiry to identify the important wider lessons that must be learned to prevent a recurrence of this systemic failure in the future," he added.
