Emasculated banking inquiry - Village Magazine

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PrOseCuTiOns NEWS

XPECT much false conﬁdence in

advance of the promised Oireachtas

inquiry into the failings of the

banking system leading up to the

disastrous guarantee of September .

Public expenditure and reform minister,

Brendan Howlin, promised that the inquiry

will provide “answers to fundamentally

important questions” when the legislation

for it came into eﬀect in late September. The

inquiry will have terms of reference that

are “narrow and speciﬁc” and will deal with

events leading to the guarantee ﬁve years ago,

the role of banks and their auditors and the

role of State institutions.

We can expect that the politicians who

convened into the early hours on th/th

September  along with the oﬃcials

from the various government departments,

the Central Bank and regulators oﬃce, will

be called to give evidence and that the hear-

ings will be televised to maximise the impact

on a citizenry desperately searching for the

facts surrounding the decisions made in

those crucial days that have wreaked such

havoc in their lives.

Observers who can’t even remember

what the Honohan, Regling and Watson, and

Wright Commission reports found, won’t be

holding their breath. In any event the wings

of any forensic inquiry are being clipped -

even if one could be adequately carried out

by small number of Oireachtas members

with little or no banking or ﬁnance experi-

ence. Firstly, it excludes any examination

of Anglo Irish Bank, the sharp and reckless

practices of which contributed greatly to the

collapse, due to forthcoming criminal trials

of three of their executives (in which Seán

Quinn and his family are expected to appear

as witnesses for the prosecution).

Secondly, it will undoubtedly be ham-

pered by the memory lapses and tantrums

which in turn inspire legal advice which

shifts the players and the audience every now

and then to the Four Courts as we witnessed

so often with the Dublin Castle tribunals.

And there is the overwhelming inﬂuence

of the main banks which brought the mess

upon us in the ﬁrst place when

they claimed to have liquidity

problems at a time when they

were hopelessly insolvent and

exposing the Irish people to a

€ billion debt mountain.

It is evident from their

(mainly) arrogant demeanour

at the Oireachtas Finance com-

mittee a few weeks ago that

senior bank executives have no

intention of changing their fun-

damental purpose in life – which

is to make as much proﬁt as pos-

sible for their shareholders and

for themselves in the process.

The biggest, and third, rea-

son for scepticism, however, lies

in the repeated failures of the

authorities to deal with bank-

ing excess following scandals

exposed in the s (AIB-ICI/

Irish Permanent), in the s

(DIRT/Ansbacher/AIB-Rusnak) and in the

/s (AIB-Faldor/Moriarty/Flood/

Mahon) when the practices that brought the

country to its knees were so often exposed

and then allowed to continue.

Only eighteen months ago, the Mahon

report recorded how in the early s

AIB oﬃcials would collect wads of cash from

Bertie Ahern at his St Luke’s oﬃce for deposit

in the O’Connell Street branch and that the

then ﬁnance minister would change tens of

thousands in foreign currency in the same

branch, without question. It reported that

another AIB oﬃcial helped Frank Dunlop

open a secret Rathfarnham account through

which hundreds of thousands ﬂowed in cor-

rupt political payments. Senior executives of

the bank were accused of withholding infor-

mation from its client, Tom Gilmartin ,and

in eﬀect colluding with the illicit payments

to councillors which were then reimbursed

from Gilmartin’s personal account despite

his ignorance of them. (The IPBS and Irish

Nationwide did not emerge from the inquiry

garlanded in roses either.)

In the aftermath of Mahon AIB chief

executive , David Duﬀy, promised that

the misbehaviour identiﬁed in the damn-

ing report would never be repeated in the

bank. Yet nothing has been done to take

action against those responsible for such

misbehaviour.

Seeing politicians such as former

Taoiseach Brian Cowen and his attorney

general, civil servants David Doyle, Dermot

McCarthy and Kevin Cardiﬀ and former

bankers Dermot Gleeson, Eugene Sheehy,

(ex-AIB), Brian Goggin, and Richie Burrows

(ex-Bank of Ireland) on any sort of a public

stand will provide some gratiﬁcation, unless

the protagonists acquit themselves better

than envisaged, but it may achieve little. Only

criminal prosecutions of central players who

acted outside of the law to enrich themselves

and others at the expense of the Irish peo-

ple, based on evidence gathered through the

forensic eﬀorts of the Garda, accountants,

lawyers and ﬁnancial experts can satisfy

the public appetite for justice. The roles of

the DPP, the Central Bank and private pros-

ecutors in such prosecutions need to attract

much of the journalistic interest that is being

diverted to the sideshow in inquiryland.

Emasculated

banking inquiry

Prosecutions more important than another inquiry. By Frank Connolly