Sir, – There are ethics and there are personal and political interests and, without an effective regulatory regime, it is naïve to expect compliance with the rules if these interests are at stake.
When Matthew Elderfield came to town in 2010 to sort out the catastrophic failures of our system of financial services regulation, he put it simply: “You need invasive scrutiny and effective sanctions.”
The problem is compounded when those who make the regulations have most to lose from genuine reform.
In her concluding remarks to the book Irish Governance in Crisis (2010), its editor, Niamh Hardiman, observed that, even when we have rules “the application and enactment of the rules is open to flexibility. Under- or non-reporting does not attract serious sanction. Verification of statements is problematic. Powers of effective enforcement are weak. But perhaps, more fundamentally , there appears to be a disjuncture between the normative preferences of many politicians and the rules they are obliged to adhere to.”
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Prof Hardiman was referring to the governance of funding for political parties, but the political culture that countenanced such laxity atthat time has not gone away. – Yours, etc,
EDDIE MOLLOY,
Dublin 6.
