Madam, – In his article on the “dying year”, Joseph O’Connor has admirably described what happened to this country and why “we are where we are” (Opinion, December 27th). He makes the important point that “we didn’t get here by accident” and in one sentence captures the essence of the cause of our problems when he said “power is safe when unaccountable”.
At the top of all the institutions, the mismanagement of which have brought us to where we are, were people who felt themselves untouchable. The reasons for that are that too many of those, who knew what was happening and whose duty it was to hold the powerful to account, were intimidated into silence and became complicit in a cover up.
Those who were not intimidated into silence were labelled “whingers and moaners” and were banished to the outer darkness where they were taunted and scoffed at. As Joseph O’Connor says, when we “drill down to the bedrock of what it is in our society that permitted, indeed caused, such a brutalising crisis” we have to admit that people in positions of power became unaccountable for the exercise of that power.
The remedy to the present situation is, therefore, that we have to make a new year resolution to never again let the most powerful citizens in the country, at the head of our most important institutions, feel so safe and unaccountable that they feel themselves untouchable. – Yours, etc,