Writing in
The Irish Independent last week, former chief economist for the Central Bank,
Tom O’Connell, said one of the reasons no-one 
shouted ‘stop’ during the
property boom is that the boards of the Central Bank and the Financial
Regulator were stuffed with people who didn’t ask the hard questions.
He wrote: “With
one political party in power semi-permanently in Ireland…there was unlikely,
therefore, to be the necessary diversity of views on the boards to ask the hard
questions and challenge the conventional wisdom regarding the sustainability of
what was happening.”
O’Connell
is right, but what he says applies not just to boards of banks and financial
regulators, it applies to statutory and other bodies in just about every field
of Irish life.
For
example, is there anyone on the board of the Crisis Pregnancy Agency who would
strongly challenge what is essentially the Irish Family Planning Agency view of
crisis pregnancy and what must be done to address it?
Do
Oireachtas Committees considering issues like family policy make a serious
effort to hear voices that dissent from the prevailing family diversity
ideology?
Why does
the Irish Human Rights Commission include only one or two people who differ
from the liberal/left view of human rights in any way?
We have a
property bubble in this country that exploded with devastating consequences. On
various social issues we are inflating a politically correct bubble that will
also burst with awful consequences. In some parts of the country, it has
already done so.