Footnotes: INBS inquiry starts as key figures fail to put in an appearance

Getting to the bottom of what happened at Irish Nationwide Building Society ahead of its collapse is not getting any easier.

More than six years after the society’s remaining assets were folded into the already defunct Anglo Irish Bank, a Central Bank inquiry into the actions of five former directors and senior staff held its first public meeting of the year on Thursday.

Michael Fingleton, the man who led the society for almost 40 years, failed to show but at least he had contacted the inquiry team to say he would not be able to make it.

None of the other four – former chairman Michael Walsh, finance director John Stanley Purcell, Tom McMenamin, a former commercial lending manager and Gary McCollum, who once headed the society's UK lending from a base in Belfast – made an appearance either, though Mr Walsh's legal team was present and actively engaged.

Who in their right mind would want to be appointed as a director of INM right now?

---

Time to stop scapegoating Airbnb and start building houses

---

Paschal Donohoe needs to offload his demon drink shares

---

The other three simply didn’t appear – and nor did any of their legal teams who would generally be expected to attend what was essentially a case management session.

All in all, it doesn’t bode well for those hoping even at this late stage for some clarity on how a venerable institution ran off the rails.

Threats to competitiveness

The National Competitiveness Council’s annual benchmarking report, published this week, told us almost nothing we didn’t already know: that our strong economic performance was masking threats to competitiveness; that Brexit and US tax reform posed an economic challenge; and that the public finances needed to be carefully managed.

Is this really news?

When it came to pronouncing on our relative competitiveness internationally, it cited three other reports, which have already been published previously, from the Swiss business school IMD, the World Economic Forum and the World Bank.

It concluded by noting that Ireland’s improving competitiveness performance over the period 2011-2017 has been central to the recovery in employment and economic growth.