The challenge for all of our institutions is to regain our trust

If any bankers are reading this, let me offer you my sympathy.

It's an awful feeling, isn't it, being tarred with the same brush. Looking at cartoons in the papers of bankers dressed as cowboys, bankers in handcuffs, bankers robbing the till they're supposed to be in charge of.

'Ye're all the bloody same, aren't ye? Just like the politicians and the priests and the builders, if one goes bad the whole tribe must be bad...' That sums up a common outlook.

Well, no, of course it's not true.

Just because there were some bankers who were prepared to go to any lengths to turn in the right profit figures, that doesn't mean that everyone who works in a bank, or everyone who runs a bank, is rotten. In fact, the vast majority of people who work in that profession are honest citizens.

But they're not immune to pressure. The DIRT scandal the one that infested the entire banking community, as opposed to the NIB scandal was occasioned in the first instance by greed, and then by competition. If one bank was offering customers an attractive service, they all had to. And they did. We know that NIB wasn't the only bank overcharging its customers.

AIB would say that while NIB's overcharging was systematic and deliberate, AIB's was accidental and the result of misunderstandings. It's up to you to decide what to believe.

But let's go back to the business of tarring everyone with the same brush. It's commonplace to put the words 'corruption' and 'politician' in the same sentence linking the politician who has fought against corruption with the one who has profited by it. Priests wince at statements that reveal the underlying assumption that all priests are complicit in child abuse. Property developers hate the notion that all property development is bad and has to be bought with brown envelopes. They are all unfair generalisations, and they are corrosive.

The most corrosive effect of the scandals in these professions is the damage it does to trust.

Authority used to be built on trust, and the authority carried by great and powerful institutions was based to a considerable degree on the fact that they were seen as incorruptible. Now these institutions and to the bankers, politicians and priests we could add law, medicine, and many other professions are widely seen as self-serving, self-regarding, and oblivious to criticism. If not corrupt, then well on the way.

How, in the space of a few short years, has this happened? When Charlie Bird and George Lee broke the NIB story in 1998, it was genuinely shocking. It was hard to believe that a bank would systematically, as a matter of policy and practice, engage on the one hand in ripping off its customers and on the other in facilitating their tax evasion.

Banks simply didn't do that. They mightn't behave like everyone's favourite uncle, but they were certainly never going to be the black sheep of the family.

Charlie McCreevy, at the time, appeared simply not to believe it or perhaps he simply didn't wish to dig too deeply into the whole area of tax evasion for fear of what he would find. Among other things, he told RTÉ in an interview in January 1998 that "the sums uncovered are very small in the context of the level of tax paid each year" and that "it is an insult to the vast majority of taxpayers to say that tax evasion is widespread".

He went on to say that people were "going off half-cocked and making ridiculous and outlandish allegations both against the Revenue Commissioners and against others".

It was a stupid and fatuous way to react. The breaking of the NIB story was a seminal moment in recent Irish history. Stories like that are the same as lifting stones we might not like what crawls out, but if maggots like that are left undisturbed, they burrow away until the entire foundation is rotten.

In recent years, a number of such stones have been lifted, with equally shocking effect. The revelation of Bishop Casey's infidelity to his vows was followed in short order by a variety of other revelations about aspects of the priesthood that have shaken the authority of the Church to its roots.

The original revelations about the difficulties between Larry Goodman and his bankers led to the uncovering of an incredible tale of cosy relationships, public policy disasters, tax evasion of a massive scale, and a deeply unhealthy approach to the regulation of a vital industry.

Allegations of corruption in the planning process have led to enquiries that have revealed corruption more widespread, deeper, and more systematic than the people making the allegations ever dreamed of.

Political revelations about a transaction between Charlie Haughey and a businessman have led to the discovery that a Taoiseach of Ireland, in order to enrich himself and pursue a vainglorious lifestyle, allowed himself to be entirely beholden to a range of commercial interests, rather than to the common good.

The first funny thing about all these revelations (actually, the first tragic thing) is that although they shocked us at the time, they don't shock us any more.

Partly, this is because of the passage of time, or rather the spread of time within which all these revelations occurred. We set up all sorts of systems to try to produce some kind of catharsis enquiries, tribunals, redress boards, and so on but in reality, they have all gone on so long they're like a dull ache that we just get used to.

Did you know, for instance, that last weekend was the 10th anniversary of the publication the beef tribunal report, a 1,000-page document that followed four years of the most painstaking investigations and astonishing revelations?

Somebody described it at the time as "60,000 lines to read between" others as one of the great cop-outs of modern times. Certainly it will always be remembered for the fact that no-one was threatened with jail arising from that report except the journalist who broke the story in the first place.

Maybe that's Ireland for you. And here's the second tragedy. It's still going on. We have learned nothing, and we continue to regard notions like transparency and accountability as wet liberal clichés. The Government has more or less killed freedom of information, and the Government continues to operate the kind of stroke politics that has given politics such a bad name.

Posturing in the Fianna Fáil tent at the Galway Races; insisting on breaking up the coherence of the civil service through the political stroke of decentralisation; spending millions of public money on daft and stupid projects that have never been subjected to any form of accountability these kind of things may not represent the corruption of the old days. But what they do reveal is a political system that has completely failed to recognise that authority is based on trust, and that trust must be earned, and earned again.

A political system that refuses to recognise that it has an obligation to continually earn the trust of the people is one that is doomed to be corrupt in the end.