The country’s second most senior Catholic cleric says the “smugness”
laid bare in the Anglo tapes jars with the desperate conditions many
victims of the economic collapse now suffer.Archbishop Diarmuid Martin said the recordings underlined the need for stronger regulation and oversight of financial institutions to ensure they did not abuse public trust again.
“Self-regulation works for saints,” he said.
He was speaking after a visit to the Capuchin Day Centre in Dublin where Franciscans provide more than 750 meals daily to the city’s poor and hand out 1,600 food parcels every week.
“The only comment I can make is, ‘think what I heard on the radio this morning [about Anglo], think what I’ve seen here today’. They’re two realities of Irish life — the smugness of some people and the total insecurity and precariousness of the people here. Both of those are linked.”
He said he had confidence in the Garda probe into activities at the bank but cautioned that the complexities and burden of proof involved presented challenges. He said any other inquiry should be focused on the facts of what happened.
“It shouldn’t be just politically motivated, it should get out the facts, because we need a functioning economic and monetary system but we also need to see the pitfalls that exist.
“We have to learn the lessons of the past so we can move forward in the future. Here [at the Capuchin Centre] you see a totally other side of the fruits of what went on in those years.”
He said questions had to be asked about how the behaviour at Anglo evolved. “You ask yourself why is it that in such a huge institution that ethics didn’t address the question of how you manage honestly and transparently a business where you look after people’s monies that have been given to you in trust?”
Parallels could be drawn with the Catholic Church, he said. “The extraordinary complexity of the financial world can give people the impression that, I’m not really responsible for what happened.
“We had this a little bit in the Church with the management of child sexual abuse — that it was a systems failure. I use the example where you are baking a cake. I only put the sugar in and I only put the flour in but the cake is there and it’s bad cake, it’s a mouldy cake.
“Everybody has to live up to their responsibilities. But there’s a problem in human nature — there is a goodness in all of us but there is a tendency to go in the wrong direction. That’s why we need checks and balances. We need proper regulation, we need transparency.
“There was a particular period in time when in the financial world, the idea was that the markets must be left free, anything which impedes the markets impedes their function... [but] self- regulation works with saints.”