Introductory address by Michael Buckley, Group CEO, AIB, at WIBF Ireland event on 31st May 2005.
The following is text of speech by Emily O' Reilly, Ombudsman & Information Commissioner, at WIBF Ireland event on 31st May 05:
I'd like to begin with a clarification. The choice of title for my address here this evening stems more from its attractive alliteration than its accuracy. Yes, I was a journalist, but no I'm not a jurist in the sense of a legally qualified individual such as a barrister or a Judge. As Ombudsman I make non-binding recommendations in disputes between complainants and public bodies; as Information Commissioner I make binding decisions in relation to Freedom of Information requests - which can of course be appealed to the courts - but in neither role am I a law officer and I would hate for any of you to leave here tonight thinking I was getting above myself.
It was suggested to me, when considering what I would talk about here today, that I might reflect on the changes that have taken place in Ireland as I went through my twenty years in journalism and the now two years that I've spent as Ombudsman. I was also invited to touch on the issue of accountability, which, as if an Ombudsman, Information Commissioner, member of the Standards in Public Office Commission, Referendum Commission, Public Appointments Commission and Constituency Commission needed to be told, is a "hot" topic nowadays. I was further invited to give my views on the "power of journalism". So you can see that you're all in for a long night.
I have to confess that I at times get weary talking about "accountability". It's become one of those words, along with openness and transparency that is used with such eye watering frequency that it has lost its power to impress. The former Finance Minister and now European Commissioner Charlie McCreevy, used to refer to the three words as the great Goddess OTA, openness, transparency and accountability. He didn't actually spit when he said them, but there was certainly an implied spit.
Others have equally jaundiced views and they're not all politicians either. British philosopher Onora O'Neill, said in 2003 in a homily on "trust", "In the last two decades, the quest for greater accountability has penetrated all our lives, like great draughts of Heineken, reaching parts that supposedly less developed forms of accountability did not reach."
O'Neill's thesis is that too much accountability in the form of voluminous regulation and control, acts to frustrate the system and inhibit institutions from hospitals to schools to universities etc. from providing an optimum public service. The institutional aim becomes the servicing of the voracious regulator rather than the public. Given that she herself is an academic and increasingly under the cosh of central government demands for greater academic outputs - as they call them - I suspect a little bit of self-interest at play.
"The pursuit of ever more perfect accountability, " she laments, "provides citizens and consumers, patients and parents with more information, more comparisons, more complaints systems, but it also builds a culture of suspicion, low morale and may ultimately lead to professional cynicism, and then we would have grounds for public mistrust."
Yet the recent and fashionable explosion in regulators, Ombudsmen, Commissioners etc. didn't come about for the hell of it. No Government woke up, gazed around at a perfect, public service minded, health, education, transport, communications, banking etc. landscape and thought, I know let's get some busybody regulators in and screw it all up.
To look at how our own ever expanding system of regulation emerged, let me take you back to the year 1989, the year I began life as a Political Correspondent and imagine yourselves sitting beside me and gazing down from our perch on the Dail press gallery. There, directly beneath us is an Taoiseach Charles J Haughey, to his left sit two of his most loyal and most senior Ministers, the newly appointed Minister for the Environment Mr Padraig Flynn, and the newly appointed Minister for Justice Mr Ray Burke. Slightly to their left, on the government backbenches, sits Mr Liam Lawlor TD and just across the way, on the opposition benches sits Mr Michael Lowry TD. If the walls were made of glass and if we could gaze just a little way across the city, to the beautiful City Hall, we would see the assistant city manager Mr George Redmond.
Emily O'Reilly addresses delegates at WIBF Ireland event on 31st May 2005.
Now I don't intend to bore you with a recital of the very well known events that took place that year and indeed earlier and later years and which were subsequently uncovered, sometimes by sheer fluke, sometimes by dint of official investigation and which have had profound consequences not just for the individuals most directly involved - three of whom have either spent or are spending periods in jail - but for many of the institutions of this state, be it the political class, the banking system, the accountancy system, the Revenue Commissioners and indeed for the ordinary citizen.
Greater demands for political accountability, for the breaking of the too tight link between big business and politics, for a tougher regime for tax evaders, for greater knowledge of the inner workings of the broad public administration, for greater corporate governance etc. by and large each and every one of those demands and their subsequent realisation through a raft of legislation from the 1997 Freedom of Information Act, the Ethics Acts, to various bits and bobs of legislation giving quite enormous powers to the Revenue Commissioners arose from the uncovering of both political and business scandals in the 1980s and 1990s.
Over time, and quite a short period of time, the public could see that their trust had been misplaced, that many of the institutions they had trusted had acted at the very least unethically and at times corruptly. And so that undemanding trust was replaced with demanding regulation and control. In many ways, the process was and is infantilising. If you trust your child to do their homework, you don't need to check it. If you discover that the homework is not being done, trust is broken and a new system of oversight has to be brought in.
Here in Ireland we're at a particular stage of that particular type of regulatory evolution, somewhere between adolescence and adulthood and the proliferation of regulators and regulator types such as Ombudsmen is likely to continue growing. The Financial Services Ombudsman was recently appointed and there are plans and promises for a Defence Forces Ombudsman and a Garda Ombudsman. We're also getting some kind of turbo charged consumer watchdog thankfully not called an Ombudsman as that territory is getting rather crowded.
In Britain the system is now so regulated that there is a danger of remit confusion, with much time spent disentangling roles and remits from the monstrous spiders web of regulation that has developed. Some consideration is even being given, God forbid, to an Ombudsman for Ombudsmen.
Over time I imagine, the onward march of regulation in both jurisdictions could reach such a complex and unwieldy stage, that it may have to be slimmed down particularly if that regulation has itself become a bloated self-perpetuating industry serving less the public than the regulatory regime. But this is not an argument against regulation. Far from it. Last night's Prime Time programme on the abuse of the elderly in a Dublin nursing home graphically illustrated what can happen when insufficient regulation is in place. Other reports today on the apparent misappropriation of funds from a Dublin charity also highlighted the need for regulation in that particular area of public life.
But I think that there is another, more fundamental question to be considered. And that is, is the public actually better governed nowadays with a regulator on every street corner making sure we're not mugged by a bank or a public body as we walk by. The answer on one level of course, is yes. As Ombudsman I have the very satisfying task of gifting to aggrieved complainants a resolution of their problems that no amount of their own pleading with a particular public body or local authority had managed to exact. I have seen some of the most maginalised and vulnerable people in the country helped by my Office and only because of my Office and I have no doubt that every other Ombudsman and regulator can point to similar successes in bringing industry or public administration to account.
But my point is slightly more oblique. When I ask whether we are being better governed I mean in the very widest sense. As an ordinary citizen, casting aside all of my hats I wonder whether we are sufficiently aware of how we are really governed, as opposed to how we think we are governed by looking up by the Government wesbite and accessing at least the public working of the administration.
Do we know who the real decision makers are, the so called key influencers, are we naive in our belief that in a normal, peaceful western democracy such as ours, the people decide who the government should be and then the government proceed to do the people's bidding and only the people's bidding. Are we then further reassured in these assumptions by the addition of this layer of minders and nannies that have been grafted on to our system of administration in recent years. Go deeper and ask yourself who ARE the "people" anyway?
I'm not about to describe any conspiracy, any malign intent on the part of this government or any previous government. What I want to look at is the nature of real power in this society as opposed to the power that is named and described to us in the Constitution as the actual power such as for example, the Oireachtas or the judiciary and then to ask if these real powers are as accountable as others. Are politicians even aware of the real influences on their thought processes as they commit vast sums of public money on projects and initiatives or introduce new legislation.
British journalist Anthony Sampson, in his new book, Who Runs this Place?, has updated his seminal 1960's work Anatomy of Britain to take account of the changes in that society in the last 40 years.
In his first book Sampson used a set of interconnecting circles to illustrate the balance of power between various British institutions. As you can see no one power centre seemed overly to dominate the others. It is worth noting in particular, how relatively small the press and television circles were and how large those of the civil service and indeed the scientists. The cabinet was viewed as middling powerful, with parliament viewed as slightly more powerful and no circle was afforded to the separate entity of the Prime Minister. At this stage, clearly, the dictum of Primus inter Pares, first among equals was held dear.
Eugene Sheehy, Group CEO Designate, AIB, with Annette Farrell, WIBF, & Emily O'Reilly
And now, compare and contrast with the 2004 circles.
Several things are immediately striking. The 1960s circles showed no overweaning dominance by any one group. By 2004 this relative equilibrium between the different power bases has been shattered. The media hogs the biggest single circle, followed just a hairs' breadth behind by the rich, and not too far behind them the personage of the Prime Minister, an Office that didn't even deserve its own little circle in the 1960s. Treasury is big, as too are corporations, bankers, accountants and pension funds. Parliament and cabinet are shrunken when set against the Prime Minister while the cabinet too is diminished.
When I saw this I was naturally tempted to draw my own little diagram of circles and indeed it might be an interesting exercise for the rest of you at a dinner party or even, for real fun, at a board meeting. We know of course that certain parts of this power evolution may come to a crashing, end of the dinosaurs type finale once Tony Blair eventually exits stage left. His near dictatorial control of his own cabinet, party and therefore - in effect - parliament has been and continues to be remarkable, but may yet prove to be an aberration from the normal way of things political in Britain, until of course you remember Margaret Thatcher.
I don't think the Taoiseach Bertie Ahern would bag as big a circle as Tony but there would certainly be three medium sized ones named Ahern, Harney and McDowell. Given our economy, the rich, the bankers, the accountants and arguably the lawyers would also bag a sizeable clutch of biggish circles and we could possibly stick the property developers in there as well.
Even allowing for some cultural and other differences, it is clear that in both the UK and Ireland, some power has shifted away from what one might call the traditional establishment, the civil service, the parliament, the political parties and other broadly speaking public services and towards the wealth makers and a dominant political elite that is, while still possessed of a social conscience, very much in tune with the harmonies, rhythms, riffs and beats of the burgeoning entrepreneurial class.
Wealth and politics will ,of course, always schmooze. No politician in a market economy can be indifferent to the wealth creators and the wealthy in turn like to sniff the one power they don't have, or at least are not supposed to have - to legislate. A recent vignette. A friend happened to be down in the K club for a meeting last week. As he approached the main entrance, there, parked in a neat row, were not one, not two but three helicopters which had transported three of the richest, if not the richest businessmen in Ireland to play golf with former US President Bill Clinton who incidentally arrived by modest car. Now I've seen the former President play golf and believe me the three lads were not there to pick up a few tips on pitching. Clinton has of course been a long time out of power but like good aftershave, the aroma of that power lingers still and is attractive still.
A former adviser to Tony Blair, Andrew Adonis describes the helicopter triplet types as the "Super Class".
He says, "The Super Class" like the medieval clergy and the Victorian factory owners, has come not just to defend but to believe in the justice of its new wealth and status. Buttressed by a revamped official ideology (which even New Labour dares not question) lauding financial rewards as the hallmark of success and economic growth, and rejecting post-war notions of social cohesion, by the late 1980s the professional and managerial elite was unapologetic about the explosion of income differentials and prepared to concede few if any social disadvantages in the process...their life style....London, servants, second homes, globalism, the best of private education, health and leisure, exotic foreign holidays, modern art, an almost total separation from public life - these are the dominant themes in the life of the Super Class."
And what of our Super Class - Dublin 4 - Barbados - art - golf - staggeringly large property portfolios - private jets - trophy spouses - success marked almost solely by financial reward - very active on the charity party circuit but rather mute when it comes to articulating a social vision or involving themselves in that part of public life not directly connected to their own interests.
I sometimes wonder whether this is because the wealthy, even in this tiny country, are more cut off now from whatever passes as normal life than at any other time in the recent past. Foreign homes, helicopters, electric gates - all contrive to allow these people to be in the country but curiously not of it. If they think about society what do they think of? The tax regime possibly, regulators that might impact on whatever their core business or businesses are; crime prevention perhaps; planning regulations and legislation; and here I might be wrong and doing many people a disservice but how often do we hear the seriously wealthy talk about education policy, the health service, welfare policy, heritage protection.
Grace Perrott, WIBF, facilitating the Question & Answer session with Emily O'Reilly
A former senior Government Minister denied to me recently the rich are powerful, in the sense of being able to influence policy. He acknowledged of course that wealth gives access but added, "But everybody in this country has access."
He was right on one level, certainly there is no comparison between the access that Irish people have to politicians including Government Ministers and the access the British have. But then there's access and access. JP McManus is on one line, the president of St Vincent de Paul on another. Who's more likely to be put on hold?
I spoke at length some months ago about the effects of wealth on Irish society and I'm not about to repeat myself. The address I made at the Ceifin conference in Ennis generated a lot of debate. But for everyone who agreed with my views, I've no doubt there were others who rolled their eyes to heaven and cursed my naivete, ridiculed the notion that in too many ways Irish society was worse than it was 20 years ago.
I can understand that impatience. I also noted with interest an interview that the Taoiseach did with Pat Kenny on the Late Late Show just last Friday where many of the points that have been made about the negative effects on wealth were put to him. The Taoiseach largely dismissed the notion that people were happier twenty years ago, pointing, correctly, to the huge levels of poverty and unemployment that were prevalent in the 1980s.
I can understand his irritation. He has helped to oversee the creation of a hugely successful economy which has brought many many people out of poverty and given others the dignity of work and a quality of life unimagined by their parents, he has helped to give people the things they begged for two decades ago and still he's surrounded by whingers, evincing a prissy, ungrateful Catholic distaste even for the fun by products of wealth, notably shoes, handbags and the uncontrolled spread of Top Shop.
Indeed, the Taoiseach might even applaud the words of Ian McEwan in his latest novel Saturday who puts a novel, positive spin on the shopping festish that now infuses much of the wealthy developed world. For those who haven't read it, the story's action takes place on the day of the 2003 anti-war March in London as the main character, Perowne, goes about his business dodging and weaving away from the crowds that cram the London streets.
Reflecting on Iraq, Islamic militancy, September 11, and the role of religion in present day world politics, Perowne takes comfort from his own epicurean pursuit of the perfect fish for his planned family bouillabaisse later that evening Mac Ewan writes, "It's time to go shopping. Despite the muscle pain in his thighs, he strides briskly away from his car, locking it with the remote without looking back. Sudden winter sunlight clarifies his path along the High Street. The largest gathering of humanity in the history of the islands, less than two miles away, is not disturbing Marylebone's contentment, and Perowne himself is soothed as he dodges around the oncoming crowds and all the pushchairs with their serenely bundled infants. Such prosperity, whole emporia dedicated to cheeses, ribbons, Shaker furniture is a protection of sorts. This commercial well-being is robust and will defend itself to the last. It isn't rationalism that will overcome the religious zealots, but ordinary shopping and all that it entails - jobs for a start, and peace, and some commitment to realisable pleasures, the promise of appetites sated in this world, not the next. Rather shop than pray."
Rather shop than pray, a superb mantra for 21st century Ireland and while I cannot disagree with the Taoiseach's evaluation of the temporal happiness that economic success has bought, I still put forward the following humble thought in relation to the power of the rich on this society and it is this. The wealthy may have no direct influence on legislation, but their lifestyle is capable of inducing the kind of swooning envy that prompts the sort of personal and political choices that do not always promote the needs of society as a whole.
But, of course, like the elephant in the fridge, there is one power base that not alone cannot be ignored but which has garnered unprecedented influence in this country, and that is the media. And what is key to understanding its power is the recognition that those who are most sensitive to the potential impact of that power are the politicians, and particularly those politicians who hold power in Government themselves. The net effect is that not alone do Governments run the risk of being literally led by the nose by an omnipotent, omnipresent media, but they may fail to realise that they - who hold or should hold the public trust and who are utterly or should be utterly accountable to no one but the public - are allowing themselves at times to be controlled by a largely unaccountable media. To pose another way the question I posed earlier, JP McManus on one line, St Vincent de Paul on another and Charlie Bird on the third. Who gets the call back now?
Sampson writes of the British media, "They present themselves as detached observers, removed from political and commercial pressures. They have helped to transform the British picture of themselves over forty years, reflecting but also magnifying or distorting the changing social attitudes, tastes and fashions. But they themselves are in the midst of the market place, subject to their own obligations, ambitions and alliances. They are claiming to be passive narrators of reality while in fact being extraordinarily active in shaping that reality.
"Their political power," continues Sampson, "has become much more visible, and more controversial. As the traditional institutions have become less effective counterweights, the media have come to see themselves as the main opposition to government and as correctives to the abuse of power with a duty to expose lies and corruption. Yet their own legitimacy is uncertain. They have never been elected by anyone, and tabloid journalists are distrusted, according to opinion polls as much as politicians. They are outside any constitutional constraints or control. And they are dependent in the end on commercial masters who are much more interested in profits than in public service, and who press them to boost circulation or ratings by dumbing down and trivialising.
"While journalists constantly call politicians to account, they are not themselves accountable to any electorate. They are, wrote Pater Mandelson in 2002, aggregating to themselves an unaccountable power that most people would think is inappropriate in a modern democracy, rather as the trade unions did in the 1960s and 1970s. As the media become more dominant in setting the political agenda and providing the democratic debate, while other institutions become weaker, so the democratic question becomes more pressing; whom do they really speak for."
And as in Britain, politicians in this country know that getting the media onside is critical. In my time as a political journalist I noticed enormous changes in the manner in which the media was attempted to be managed particularly at general election time. In 2002, the last election I covered, one particular party put more thought - and I'm not kidding here - into what was known as the post morning press conference chill out room with accompanying danish pastries and soft furnishings - than arguably into certain policy proposals.
Still, they haven't yet reached the levels of Blair's Britain, but no doubt, like everything else we'll get there in time. In fact many of the media techniques used by Fianna Fail at the last election were learnt in Labour HQ in Millbank itself, where a number of party workers were sent prior to the last election to observe.
In 1994 Tony Blair said "The only thing that matters in this campaign is the media, the media, and the media." In 2001, another Labour MP wrote, "It is now the media not the party who are crucial to securing electoral victory. They must therefore be kept onside and serviced at all times." During the recent British General Election, the fact that the Sun came out in support of Labour, following rumours that Rupert Murdoch was about to wobble, became a major story in itself, even in the broadsheets. Had the Sun proprietor flicked a coin and gone the other way, could we now be sure that Labour would be in power in Britain? The answer is probably yes, but perhaps with an even slimmer majority. We had our own Sun moment in 1997 when the highly influential Irish Independent newspaper came out in favour of a change in Government. They were perfectly entitled to do so, but when the Government did change, the part that may have been played in that event became and still is a significant talking point.
And when politicians believe rightly or wrongly that a a newspaper has the power of political life or death, what effect can that have on decision making?
This sort of mutual cannibalisation practised by both media and politicians is graphically and at times hilariously illustrated in the recently published diaries of Piers Morgan, the former editor of the Mirror and before that The Sun. Any of you who doubted the extent of collusion between politicians and serious media players should have a read.
Take March 3 1997, the day after a by election victory for Labour in the run-up to the eventual General Election where Blair would triumph. Morgan writes, "Blair wrote to thank me for the front page. 'Just a note to say thanks for a wonderful front page and also for all your support. The paper is in great shape and in no small measure due to you. Keep in touch, Tony."
The election was held on the first of May. On May 9th, a mere 8 days later, yet another hand-written note from Tony. "Dear Piers, Thanks for your great coverage during the election campaign. You made a really significant contribution to our victory. Well done! Let's meet up soon. Tony."
Morgan adds, "His office called later to invite me over on Monday. It feels worryingly intoxicating to be on such matey terms with the new most powerful man in the country." Arguably, the feeling was mutual and thankfully, possibly to save his readers the tedium of doing it themselves, Morgan later helpfully added up and jotted down the number of times he and his mate Tony got together during Morgan's editorship.
He wrote " Bored one evening, I counted up all the times I had met Tony Blair. And the result was astonishing really, or slightly shocking - depending on your viewpoint. I had 22 lunches, 6 dinners, 6 interviews, 24 further one-to-one chats over tea and biscuits, and numerous phone calls with him. That's a lot of face time with arguably Britain's most important person."
While I was preparing for this evening, I asked a number of people, active at high levels in public life about their view of where real power resides in this society. Without exception, they named the media as the single most powerful grouping. They also remarked at the enormous increase in power of the fourth estate in the least twenty years. They attributed various reasons for this, not least of which was the increase in the sheer size of the beast. When I was Political Correspondent in 1989, myself and my Pol Corr colleagues fitted neatly along just one half of the press gallery in Leinster House, by 2003 when I left, it was a scrum.
And then there's the 24 seven news cycle. Let's take the recent saga of Junior Minister Conor Lenihan's Kebabs remark as an example of how that works. The Minister's slightly off mike comment was picked up nonetheless by the Oireachtas broadcasting unit, an entity that didn't even exist 20 years ago and was quickly noted by an RTE presenter on a programme which also didn't exist years ago. This presenter's commentary then alerted other journalists and politicians to what had happened. The media then sought reaction and subsequent news bulletins carried not just the remark but the cross reaction to the remark.
By this stage Minister Lenihan was well aware that trouble was brewing and hightailed smartly into the Dail chamber to apologise. The apology now became the news and following that the reaction to the apology. And as it's still only 1pm, and unfortunately for Conor, his comments have come just in time for listeners to the Joe Duffy programme to marshall their indignation and give vent to it on air for the best part of the following hour. By this stage, Conor's remark was a major story for every national and local radio and TV station, not to mention the newspapers that were being prepared for the following day and a myriad news websites.
The following morning brought further debate on Morning Ireland and while one might have thought that the Marian Finucane Show might skip it, her producers decided to launch a telephone poll to see whether the public thought Conor should resign. Each programme, each reporter in turn was trying to top every other programme and reporter like some weird game of political dominoes with the sole aim of course of seeing whether Domino Conor would collapse under the weight of the media dominoes or just hang in there. Well, he hung in there, but arguably, it was a close call, given the pressure he was under, but pressure which was undeniably driven more by the media than the opposition politicians, none of whom had unequivocally demanded his resignation.
The clever politicians, the clever businessmen, the clever bankers just go with the flow, play with it as much as they can because the media quite literally will always have the last word. They know its power and I am always mightily impressed by the ease at which John Murray and his colleagues on the RTE business news can summon up the most stellar members of our business and banking elite when it comes to getting a few minutes of airtime for their latest results, mergers or acquisitions. The clever ones also knows that unless a reporter says something off the richter scale of falsehood or general nastiness it's best to bite your lip and say nothing. The media dislikes over-sensitivity, particularly among the privileged.
There has been much talk in recent years about press councils and privacy and media accountability generally. Nothing has happened to date apart from a tedious round of seminars and position papers but then what realistically could happen. Privacy laws or a statutory press council could perhaps curb the sharp end of the media game - the grosser intrusion, the nastier comments, but the communications revolution of the last decade means that little is off limits. Witness the recent controversy around the Rate My Teachers website - it's inconceivable that a standard news medium would get away with publishing it, yet the teachers' unions have now, much to their frustration, discovered, that - so far at any rate - it can't be touched - its extra territorial origin leaves it immune from legal challenge.
In recent years a number of individuals, political and business people, have been forced out of office, partly of course, because of bad behaviour or perceived bad behaviour on their part but also because the media in effect, decided they should go. Other have had their reputations damaged, sometimes irreparably, sometimes fairly, sometimes unfairly. Ten, fifteen years ago, the knowledge of an indiscretion, a piece of bad judgement, a bad call, even a criminal act, might never have made it into the media perhaps because the media pool was so small that no one picked it up, or perhaps because a different set of standards applied, knowing something damaging about an individual didn't necessarily mean that it had to be printed or broadcast.
All of that has changed. The media is so highly competitive in the 21st century that increasingly both news organisations and individual journalists are turning their backs on the old ways. In today's media world, there is little room for sensitivity, for empathy, the story is the thing, beating the opposition and maintaining readership and marketshare is paramount. When bad things happen to an individual following exposuie, that is seen as a result, little different in fact to an excellent quarterly return for a bank, or a tasty acquisition that may result in redundancies for people with whom one has little personal connection.
And in that way, the media mirrors much of contemporary commercial life. The media owners are entrepreneurs just like entrepreneurs in any business including your own. They sell a product - news - and the manner in which they fashion that news, or select that news depends, just as your businesses do, on consumer taste. The banks can be, and have been criticised for making it too easy for people to borrow money, literally by waving it under their noses in the shape of little pretend cheques that pop through the letterbox inviting you to cash a real one in through pre-approved borrowing. Gossip, scandal, sex, the holding of people to ridicule, all of these sell in much the same way, they seduce the would be buyers of the newspapers just as the marketing blurb seduces the would be borrowers.
I'm not being critical of the banks here, or the media, or indeed other business types. I'm just pointing out that everyone is in the same basic game and no one institution private or public has a monopoly on either goodness or badness. Everyone chasing the same goal - profits.
But you here may argue, and I would partly agree that despite your mutual interest in securing profits that you are still more accountable than the media. You have the Central Bank looking over your shoulder, IFRSA, also the new Financial Service Ombudsman and probably a plethora of other regulator types than I'm less familiar with. At least if you behave badly there's someone who's going to tick you off or punish you. What happens when the media behaves badly? Yes, there are the courts if you feel you've been libelled, but that's a highly expensive option, available only to the wealthy or the extremely courageous/foolhardy. There's no Ombudsman you can go to, no regulator, no adequate way of getting redress. Sometimes, the most frustrating thing is when you haven't been libelled but have had something so unfair said about you, that it sets your teeth on edge.
Last year I launched a booklet called "How to Complain", published by Comhairle, the Citizens Information Centre network. There were 8 pages detailing financial institution complaints bodies, under newspapers the booklet simply said, "There is no independent complaints body for newspapers. You may write directly to the newspaper to complain. Some papers have a policy of correcting mistakes if asked and some have a readers' watch-dog to whom you may complain."
Of course, the one thing that is different about the media is that at least their at times bad behaviour is openly on view. Intrusion, unfairness, rank nastiness is visible for all to see, and if the public keep buying, as they do, what does that say about us? Also, and in fairness to the media, many of the political and business scandals mentioned earlier were exposed only because of the media and sight must not be lost of the force for good that it very often is, witness again last night's Prime Time when it took an undercover reporter to discover what no amount of state inspection had managed to uncover previously.
So, to return to the question I posed earlier, who holds real power in this country, who are the key influencers on government policy, on the behaviour of both public and private institutions. Certainly the media, the regulators, the wealth creators aka the rich have assumed enormous power and we may quibble about the extent of it, the fairness of it, the effect of it. You may grumble about media behaviour, it in turn may grumble about banking behaviour. Sometimes we are lost in a sea of words and in the calibration of rules and regulations. But every now and then perhaps we really need, as individuals, to look at our own behaviour, to see how we as individuals behave, how polished our own ethical standards are and whether we apply them not just to our personal lives but also to our daily work. Because even as individuals we all have the power to influence if we are moved to do so. The boys with the helicopters on the K Club lawn don't actually have the game all to themselves.
Delegates networking at AIB Bankcentre at event with Emily O'Reilly