Banking inquiry: A crisis foretold

FOR the past seven years, the favoured mantra of many economists and bankers has been that it was impossible to foresee Ireland’s banking crisis.

The accepted narrative is that nobody at the time suspected that Irish banks were fragile institutions and ill equipped to deal with seismic global financial shifts.

Yet an appearance yesterday by John Fitzgerald, former head of the ESRI, at the Oireachtas banking inquiry gives the lie to that, at least where one major bank is concerned.