Cantillon: ghost of bank behaviour haunts inquiry

The Oireachtas banking inquiry is making a canine dinner of its report into the affair. Committee members have rubbished a 750-page draft document, prompting urgent weekend meetings and talk of an emergency rewrite. They might have to work through Christmas!

There is some irony here, for the lacunae highlighted in the draft are eerily redolent of the woolly thinking which bedevilled the banks prior to the collapse: major omissions; assumptions for which there is no evidence; lack of a coherent narrative; a disconnect between oral and documentary evidence; and contradictory findings.

If this is someone’s idea of a post-modernist in-joke, it’s not funny.

The panel would do well to ensure the finished article delivers a decent account of what went wrong and workable recommendations on the avoidance of past error. But is anyone really surprised at this seemingly drastic turn of events?

If writing by committee is a recipe for chaos, then writing by political committee of assorted stripes smacks of chaos squared. Trouble is amplified when dealing with hundreds of pages, more so when statute forbids findings of fact being made against anyone who refutes such findings. And all this happens in the shadow of a referendum in which the people voted against giving the Oireachtas the right to make such findings.

Notwithstanding the strictures, there’s still scope for the panel to finish the job and finish it well. Moreover, everyone knew the limitations which applied when the inquiry set about its work. We don’t know what exact riding instructions were issued to the draft-writers at the outset, but what is expected of them must be pretty clear by now.

This is in the nature of the editing process: tedious, painstaking work at the best of times; and simply wretched when the core text is a mess. In the political setting, of course, such troubles would always provide ample fodder for a row. So it proved.

The committee should get on with the job. This is far too serious for farce. Or is it?