The European Central Bank (ECB) has declined to attend as a formal participant at the Oireachtas banking inquiry. Its president, Mario Draghi, has said the ECB - as a European institution - is not accountable to national parliaments, but solely to the European Parliament. However, he has indicated the central bank is considering some informal participation in the inquiry, but has yet to decide what form this might take. The ECB's refusal to attend, formally, is disappointing and regrettable - if not wholly surprising.
The central bank has missed an opportunity to provide greater clarity about its actions prior to this State's acceptance of an international bailout and to ease some public concerns by agreeing to full participation in the Oireachtas inquiry. This rebuff, together with the refusal by a former president, Jean Claude Trichet to attend the committee, may well limit the inquiry's scope and diminish its significance. It could also result in the ECB providing less than adequate accountability for its role in pressing Ireland to accept a financial bailout, following the collapse of the banks in 2008. The public hearings, which are expected to start next month, will be taking place four years after the bailout of the banks that has cost taxpayers some €64 billion.
But given Mr Trichet's absence from the inquiry and the likelihood of a limited involvement by the ECB, the central bank will risk being seen as reluctant to account in public for its decisions. Indeed the long delay in releasing correspondence between the former ECB president and the late finance minister Brian Lenihan in November 2010 - when Ireland came under pressure from the ECB to accept a financial rescue - only serves to reinforce that view. Those events are not only of interest to Ireland but are part of the history of the broader European and international financial crisis. The Irish and European public are owed a full explanation, and the ECB should not seek to minimise its role in the financial bailout by a less than full - formal - participation in the inquiry.