Capitulation costs us very, very dearly - Honesty in our public life

JUST as America continues to pay an inordinate and irrational price for its bizarre beliefs around citizens’ right to own and use military-grade weapons we pay an equally high, though less bloody, price for our absolute capitulation on openness, transparency or accountability in public life.

It is as if we imagine that these principles are a threat to our society rather than the kind of proactive honesty needed to sustain and protect it. It is as if we think these fundamental principles are something other than a way of differentiating between reality and perception, a way of winnowing delivery from promise. They are the checks and balances that might have prevented Putin’s Russia becoming a dangerous kleptocracy, the kind of honesty that might have prevented, or at least constrained, the self-delusion that has done so much to bring Greece to the tragic juncture it finds itself at today.

Just take a look a the evidence of recent weeks. We have the banking inquiry, earnest and determined, trundling through its hearings which are now more to do with history than justice. Nevertheless, it exposed incompetence at the highest levels in our regulartory systems and civil service, shocking incompetence that had no consequences for the cabal of senior civil servants who were, as charity and the vernacular decree, asleep at the wheel.

The banking inquiry heard, nearly a decade after the event, that ESRI and the Central Bank officials were told by their politicial masters to sweeten reports and not to publish the evidence that suggested that our Celtic tiger economy was a fantasy, evidence that might have made the fabled soft landing just possible. If we had a culture of transparency and openness might that civil servant have felt free to ignore the politicians’ blackguarding and tell the truth? How might that have changed our recent history? For better or worse?

Over recent days our Government have been dragged, kicking and screaming, to the realisation that one of those comfortable, he’s-one-of-the-lads inquiries that usually do more to cloud issues and silence debate than they do to establish facts would simply not be acceptable in the case of IBRC.

The same Government seems utterly unperplexed that four years after the Moriarty report was published — just weeks after it came to power — the Director of Public Prosecution’s decision on whether the report might lead to a day in court is awaited. But then the DPP doesn’t have to explain her decisions or her indecision — even though the word “public” rings loud and clear in the job title.

While we struggle with the idea of living in a grown up world an entirely different culture was celebrated in London on Wednesday night when the head of the Bank of England warned bankers that the “age of irresponsibility is over” and recommended stiffer jail sentences for rogue traders.

It is just possible, but don’t bet the farm, that the DPP will make a decision on Moriarty before an Irish central banker is so assertive but in the meantime we can take comfort in the fact, the utterly laughable fact, that this Government promised a new openness in our public affairs. As the man said it hurts too much to laugh and it’s far too late to cry.

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