LABOUR PARTY leader Eamon Gilmore has described Nama, the National Asset Management Agency, as “a scheme designed by the golden circle for the golden circle”.
At the annual James Connolly commemoration at Arbour Hill in Dublin yesterday, Mr Gilmore said Nama was “the greatest safe haven of them all”.
He claimed Taoiseach Brian Cowen was attempting to rewrite history by “whitewashing” the past. “It is a shameful exercise from a Taoiseach who wants to whitewash the past and who has no plan for the future,” he said.
“It is an exercise in self-justification from the man who at best stood idly by, while the economy was taken over by speculators and his party flaunted their connections to the golden circle. It was his party that stood at the apex of a toxic triangle of property developers, bankers and politicians, that destroyed the Irish economy.
“What we are now told is that Brian Cowen knew nothing. He heard no evil, he saw no evil, he spoke no evil. Nobody warned him.”
Mr Gilmore also said Fianna Fáil had betrayed the people of Ireland. “Nama is the greatest safe haven of them all. It is a scheme designed by the golden circle, for the golden circle and delivered in shiny packaging by Fianna Fáil.
“And every decision of Government is now subjected to the Nama test. When small businesses are crying out for relief from sky-high rents, the Nama test is applied and even more jobs are lost, rather than threaten the property economy.”
Siptu president Jack O’Connor also used the occasion to criticise the Government’s handling of the economy. He described the 1997 Fianna Fáil-Progressive Democrats coalition as a “swarm of locusts” which had “destroyed any potential for a stable economy”.
The “swashbuckling winner-takes-all” economic model had run its course, Mr O’Connor added.
He said the burden of the banking collapse had fallen on working people. It was no coincidence that Labour had opposed the “blanket credit guarantee” for banks, “because Labour was approaching it from the perspective of the working people and the citizens of Ireland rather than the interests of shareholders and bondholders”.
