Unfettered access to details is a bad idea

There’s a huge amount of questioning going on in Ireland just now. In practically every area of economic, social and political life, the recent financial crisis has forced us to confront some of our deepest-held biases and convictions and test them against possible culpability for the disaster that overtook this State eight years ago.

Policymakers and ordinary citizens alike have had to examine their own attitudes and ask hard questions about complacency and a — tolerated — lack of supervision and oversight.

We’ve had to accept the fact that in very many vital areas of our economic and commercial life that we didn’t know the facts — and, moreover, that we weren’t too bothered by that deficiency. In the post-bailout economic wreckage, many of us swore that such wilful ignorance had to cease and that — from here on in — we were going to go past the lazy clichés and actually work out how a system was constructed and, more importantly, why it was constructed in a particular way.