Coalition must accept blame for how bank inquiry has become such a farce
“ON February 25, a democratic revolution took place in Ireland. Old beliefs, traditions, and expectations were blown away. The stroke of a pen, in thousands of polling stations, created this political whirlwind. The public demanded change and looked to parties that would deliver the change they sought.”
The above is the opening paragraph of the 2011 programme for government agreed between Fine Gael and Labour as they took over the reins of power.
A democratic revolution is a compelling slogan and it, many hoped, signalled the arrival of a new politics in Ireland after the old model had brought us to our knees.
Very early on, in the spirit of the new politics, the Government committed to holding a banking inquiry in order to uncover, once and for all, exactly how our country was destroyed.
But after the defeat of the October 2011 referendum which would have granted much stronger powers to politicians in the course of Oireachtas inquiries, the Government and, more specifically, Public Expenditure Minister Brendan Howlin, stalled.
In 2012, the Public Accounts Committee sought to take ownership of any potential banking inquiry and completed an excellent and much overlooked report into the banking crash.
Most importantly, it identified more than 370 unanswered questions about failures in the banks, failures by politicians, failure by officials and failure by the regulators. But Howlin and his top advisers didn’t want to give the inquiry to the PAC or its Fianna Fáil chairman, John McGuinness.
An unseemly war of words erupted between the increasingly bullish PAC and Howlin to the point that a cat stood a better chance of chairing the pending inquiry than McGuinness.
All the while, the months were slipping by and still no sign of a report.
Then, in late 2013, it emerged that Labour’s Ciarán Lynch, who was then chairman of the Finance Committee, would take charge of an Oireachtas Banking Inquiry, which would not begin properly until 2014.
After many months of delays, a committee was constituted, only after Taoiseach Enda Kenny added two Government members to it in order to ensure it had a majority.
Kenny admitted he couldn’t rely on opposition members of the committee to do the right thing.
Independent TD Stephen Donnelly resigned from the inquiry before it began in protest at Enda’s arrogance.
But a year ago, public hearings finally got underway but, from the off, it was clear the entire process was doomed to fail.
Overly restrictive legislation and ongoing criminal cases involving former Anglo Irish Bank executives meant crucial areas of the crisis would have to be excluded.
After 413 hours of testimony and the receipt of 42,000 documents about the State’s financial collapse, all of the disappointments and frustrations aired at the time of the inquiry’s commencement have come to pass.
In recent weeks, the inquiry has descended into chaos as it moved to conclude its final report.
The original draft written by officials was branded a “piece of shit” by members, while the first redraft was deemed to be “too political”.
Already likened to a eunuch, the inquiry yesterday lost two of its leading members, Sinn Féin’s Pearse Doherty and Socialist Joe Higgins, who decided they had had enough of the farce and would not sign the report.
“The people have the right to know how the banking crisis came about, who was responsible and to be assured that it would never happen again,” he said. “I have worked constructively on the inquiry to get to the full truth of what happened.
“While the report includes new information, it fails to fully answer the questions regarding how the crisis came about and who was responsible. Our people deserve the full truth. That is why I am unable to not sign off on the committee report.”
The decision by Doherty and Higgins to bow out was as predictable as it was inevitable, given the construct of the inquiry.
So, what is the point of producing a report that is so toothless, so anodyne, that it packs no punch whatsoever? Why, given all of the deadline pressures, limitations, and setbacks, are the remaining members continuing?
Pride, obviously, is one consideration and you cannot fault the members for their dedication to this futile cause. But there will also be the additional background documentation that will also be published alongside the meaningless report. Those documents will be a source of great interest to journalists, PhD students, and economists.
But whatever value those documents will have, the Irish people have been disgracefully shortchanged by the banking inquiry which, to date, has cost €5m. They have been robbed of proper accountability and transparency as to why our country fell off a cliff.
And while Mr Lynch deserves some share of the blame as chairman of the inquiry, the main responsibility for this cock-up belongs to Howlin and the rest of the Cabinet.
They insisted on this botched model of investigation, they dictated the pace and timing of it, they ignored the warnings, and they will now have to explain to the people why this mess came about.
Government arrogance and a desire to use the inquiry as a means to inflict political damage on Fianna Fáil was a cynical and outrageous abuse of the mandate given to them by the Irish people in 2011.
By trying to be too clever, Howlin and his Government cohorts now have egg on their faces for the farce now unravelling before us.
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