Accountability - Where are the new laws on banking?

In the past four years we have had good reason to look anew at our relationship with Europe.

We have become dependants of a system that we have no control over.

The correspondence between 2008 finance minister Brian Lenihan and ECB boss Jean-Claude Trichet confirms that. The politician was told by a mandarin what he had to do if he was to get the support he urgently needed to save zombie banks. However, as Mr Trichet was, and is in one guise or another, paying the piper he was confident his view would prevail.

Inevitably this has led to hand-wringing — justified — about the democratic deficit in European affairs but we can expect that to be the case as the EU grapples with far more fundamental issues — the survival of the euro and EU solidarity.

Parallel to this deficit we have developed one of our own, one that is even more destructive to the ideas of society, justice, accountability, and standing up for what we know is right. Later this month the fourth anniversary of the infamous bank guarantee will be marked and, apart form the odd egg thrown at the odd bank AGM, all our justice system can show for those four years is a few files specific to the former Anglo Irish Bank being sent to the DPP.

Though taxpayers have spent something north of €70b recapitalising — or bailing out, delete as you prefer — Irish banks and hundreds of billions more picking up their bondholder obligations — or gambling debts, delete as you prefer — not one banker, auditor, regulator, or accountant has faced what should be a rigorous examination by our legal system. Rather, as they knew they would, they remain untouchable and beyond the reach of justice. It may be, and this requires an innocence not seen since Ancient Rome celebrated its vestal virgins, that no laws were broken or even that we do not have laws to stand between society and the worst capitalism can inflict. It is hard to know which of those scenarios is more damaging to society.

It might be possible, just barely, for those who care for this country to turn the other cheek one more time if this immoral situation was used by our legislators — national and international — to urgently, passionately, and forcefully put in place measures to dissuade those, some of whom must be packing suitcases to winter in sunnier climes today, from taking the kind of risks that have beggared this country. Where is the legislative programme to try to prevent the next banking collapse? The next pensions collapse? The next mass destruction of wealth as well as personal and social security?

How those who might face a different future if we had behaved like a grown-up country must be delighted that we now turn our attentions to the Croke Park deal and the December budget, neither of which would be as daunting had we the laws or the will to confront reckless bankers and developers.

Four years after the bank bailout the fact that we have not changed the rules to protect society from another Anglo Irish is more shaming, more illustrative of our national and permanent culture of deference than the fact that we are a supplicant nation utterly dependent on the fickle and expensive kindness of strangers.