Madam, – Can one be a judge in one’s own case? This is, in effect, what the demand for an Oireachtas inquiry into the banking system would constitute, given that our political system should also be in the dock.
For over a decade, every annual budget contained tax reliefs/incentives for developers, investors and first-time buyers. These were aimed at inflating and sustaining the construction boom, given that the exchequer was probably the largest single financial beneficiary of that boom, certainly far larger than all the banks combined. The Opposition parties also have a case to answer, for they too were cheer-leaders for measures to help first-time buyers and changes to the stamp duty regime.
Local politicians were responsible for the zoning decisions that resulted in all those empty holiday homes and ghost housing estates on the outskirts of small country towns and villages.
No investigation of the banking system can be complete without thorough scrutiny of the political system that facilitated it. Such a wide-ranging public inquiry is, I believe, what governor of the Central Bank Prof Patrick Honohan had in mind, rather than a narrow “star chamber” to punish the bankers. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – The unloved and departed Bernie Madoff (now doing time in one of the multitudinous “security facilities” in the US) was derided for running a Ponzi scheme that took advantage of the stupidity and greed of his investors. He was treated as a crook, and there was no sympathy for him or his foolish victims, who were judged to be the authors of their own misfortune.
Our own “Bernies” ran a similar scheme here during the boom. They depended on attracting an ever-increasing and unending pyramid of credit. The investors were our Masters of the Universe: highly paid, professional, hardnosed bankers.
That’s where the similarities end. In America they were treated as fools. Here they are treated as maybe slightly misguided but actually genuine blokes who weren’t really responsible for their predicament but just got carried away a bit. Nobody told them to stop, not even the Financial Regulator. So it must have been his fault.
Instead of being thrown out of their jobs and replaced en masse, they were allowed to continue, to pontificate, to blame everyone else for their failings and to ungraciously accept billions of taxpayers’ money to save the financial institutions they had so badly mismanaged.
Let’s have a real inquiry into the banks. Even if a constitutional amendment is needed to get around all the legal obfuscation, let’s get something right for a change. – Yours, etc,