Irish Examiner View: It’s time we became a transparent society

Secrecy and evasion have long been tools used by those with something to hide and it has fuelled cynicism and facilitated injustice.

Our capacity to adapt, to modify, is defining. Without flexibility, societies calcify, some become dysfunctional and collapse. Some, unable to evolve or recognise that change has arrived, implode. We are not at that point - yet - but our disposition towards secrecy or evasion and the almost limitless opportunities social media offers those who would deliberately fill any information vacuum with the wildest, most destructive fantasies has created a volatile mix. The iceberg is in sight but whether the ship can change course in time is, as the Trump era or the anti-vaxxers' malignant hectoring shows, an open question.  

Though it's almost four years since the trial of Anglo Irish Bank chairman Sean FitzPatrick (for allegedly misleading auditors about multi-million loans) collapsed we do not yet know the full story behind that collapse. Judge John Aylmer, on the 126th day of that trial, directed the jury to acquit Mr FitzPatrick. However, in 2019 the office of Corporate Enforcement felt unable to share its report on that collapse with an Oireachtas committee because it feared “litigation risk and associated financial exposure”. So much for transparency or accountability. That a Commercial Court hearing, just this week, heard that former Anglo Irish Bank head of lending Tom Browne left his job in 2007 with €9m, including €3.7m “goodbye” money is a reminder that these issues are still, all these years later, very much alive. Might we, or Anglo, have reached those situations if we had a culture of real, ongoing accountability?