Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)

The Nyberg report spectacularly fails to identify the causes of the financial and economic crisis in simple and straightforward language. Some €1.2 million was spent on producing 100 pages of insipid financial jargon and meaningless psychobabble that blames everybody and nobody at the same time and explains little or nothing about what created the financial and economic crisis. It is evident, however, that both the former ruling party, Fianna Fáil, and the new Government of Fine Gael and the Labour Party welcome it precisely because it blames everyone and no one and tells us nothing about how the crisis started. As a result the report gives us no direction on how to deal with the crisis or its causes.

The banking crisis did not result from herding, group-think or other psychological explanations and certainly did not come, as this report at times dangerously suggests, from the action of the majority of Irish people. It did not come from "misjudging risk", as the title of the most misnamed report I can imagine suggests. It resulted from greed. The report should be called "Misjudging Greed". The crisis came about because of the staggering greed of bankers, developers and super wealthy elites in this country and internationally who were cheered on by the political establishment on almost all sides, in both this country and the EU, where an economic doctrine of greed and profit was promoted. They were also cheered on in that regard by much of the mass media. The idea that all of us, or even the majority, went along with this nonsense is insulting in the extreme. Ordinary people knew this. They could see the madness as hundreds of thousands of profit-driven private apartment blocks and office blocks were shooting up all over the city while ordinary people looking for housing on housing lists could not get a house for love or money. They knew this was mad and could see it as such, being driven by profit. Nonetheless, it was cheered on by the political establishment in this country and in Europe, was financed by the banks in both areas and cheered on by the mass media.

The proof that no lessons have been learned about the real causes of this crisis, namely, the voracious, relentless greed of a minority in this country and across Europe, comprising bankers and developers, is that now, to punish these people, we talk about tinkering around with regulatory mechanisms. In reality, the real response of this Government to the greed of the people who caused the crisis was to pour €70 billion into the same banks that caused the crisis, thereby crushing our people with brutal cutbacks, austerity, mass unemployment and emigration. This Government refuses to reverse the policies of the last Government which caused the crisis in the first place.

A further and even worse proof of the failure to learn any lessons from the crisis and its causes is the Government's plan, by selling State assets, to do to the real economy what was done to the financial sector. It plans to hand over those valuable assets to the same corporate vultures who caused the financial crisis. They can then do the same to the real economy as they did to the financial system. This is a recipe to keep going down the same road of disaster at the expense of ordinary people. It is a load of rubbish and we should point the finger at those responsible.

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