Trying to rescue banking inquiry from the wreckage

World of Politics with Harry McGee – harrymcgee@gmail.com

After speaking to about half a dozen members of the parliamentary banking inquiry on Saturday, you’d be half expecting see Tom Cruise abseil from a helicopter onto the roof of Agriculture House on Kildare Street, as the theme of Mission Impossible 11 blared out.

What a mess the banking inquiry is turning out to be.

Ten days ago, the investigations team produced a draft report. It ran to 750 pages which was extraordinarily long.

Immediately, the members realised there was a problem of zeppelin proportions.

The word that has been bandied around is ‘not fit for purpose’.

Nobody outside the committee members has seen it but you can take it the assessment of the report just doesn’t toe the particular party lines.

There are some very smart people on the committee and they are full aware of the limits of the 2013 Act that set up parliamentary inquiries. When they say the draft report is deficient, you can take it they are not too far off the mark.

The headache the committee has it has to have the draft report completed by next Tuesday. The reason for this is there is a whole protocol that has to be followed. There are loads of formal and legal requirements that need to be fulfilled in order to get the report out on January 20.

That means the draft really has to be finished by next week.

Unless, that is, the committee decides to come back and work on the only week that they have marked free. That, of course, is Christmas week.

The notion of Eoghan Murphy and Joe Higgins, Pearse Doherty, Susan O’Keeffe and Michael McGrath eating turkey and ham in a Dublin hotel on Christmas Day is a live possibility. If they came back and worked that week they would have an extra week to draft the report – and from all accounts, they need it.

Everybody I spoke on the committee said the draft as presented was a mess. It wasn’t a case of revising it. It was a case of writing a new report, trying to salvage any parts of that report.

But having a week to write a report based on thousands of documents, 130 hearings, hundreds of hours of evidence, and dozens of witnesses sounds, well, like the plot for a (rather dull) Tom Cruise franchise movie.

But there you go, that’s what the committee has set out for itself to do. Two of its members, Eoghan Murphy and Susan O’Keeffe billeted themselves into Agriculture House all weekend with a “finalisation team” in an effort to rescue the whole operation.

“We put in a few hundred submissions to the draft report a few weeks ago,” said one member to me. “We can forget about them now. It’s all about getting something together.”

That’s going to be really hard to do. The Nyberg Report, (the Commission of Investigation into the banking collapse) ran to about 165 pages.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.