I’m certainly not going to influence the regulator in any respect. I think that would be bad for the country and I think we really need to learn the lessons of the banking crisis.
The perception that the regulator can be subject to political interference or influence would be very bad for this country. (Brian Lenihan, Minister for Finance).
From 1922 until 2003 Ireland had no financial regulator whatsoever. As a result the Irish financial sector became infested with criminals who acted with impunity under the protection and connivance of a corruption political system.
From 2003 until the appointment of Matthew Elderfield last year we had a so called financial regulator that cooperated with and protected the same criminals under instruction from a corrupt and conniving political system.
Today we have a real financial regulator being subjected to massive pressure from the same corrupt and conniving political system because, for the first time in the history of the state, a financial regulator is making an honest attempt to clean up the mess.
Let me make something crystal clear – Mr. Elderfield will not succeed in his job. The corruption and rot is far too deep, far too widespread throughout Irish society for him to have any hope. We are a diseased nation, terminally infected with the disease of corruption, not even radical surgery can save us.
Lenihan’s words about perceptions and political interference in financial regulation are decades too late. He, his party and the entire political system is a dinosaur way past its extinction date.
We need to accept that as a nation we are a failed entity, a dead nation. We need to bury the diseased body of our corrupt political system and start again.
I think a distinction needs to be made between the State and the Nation. It is the State which is corrupt and diseased. The Nation is the people qua people. The State is the apparatus which is set up to manage the Nation. It is the State that needs to be reformed, nay replaced. If it was the Nation which was corrupt and diseased I fear there would be no hope whatsoever. As a Nation, however, we have one outstanding fault – we are tolerant to a subservient degree. How else can one explain why it took us 800 years to get rid of the shackles of a foreign imperial State. Will it take another 800 years to rid ourselves of the one under which we now suffer?