It was difficult not to dwell upon the old legal maxim, “justice delayed is justice denied”, on Wednesday when the written decision of the regulatory inquiry into Irish Nationwide Building Society (INBS) was finally published. 

After all, it is now closing in on 15 years since the state bailed out the troubled lender, and 14 years since it was merged with Anglo Irish Bank, another buccaneering property lender that collapsed amidst its own hubris. 

The world has moved on so much since those dizzying times, when the collapse of the Irish banks eroded the solvency of the State, and for a time, threatened the survival of the euro itself. There have been public hearings, trials, and numerous reports and investigations. The country has returned to rude financial health. The pandemic changed everything.

I have long argued that there has been little real cultural rehabilitation with the remaining Irish banks – AIB’s treatment of the Belfry investors and the conceit around the tracker scandal is proof of that. But at least our banks’ balance sheets are solvent, and the Central Bank has beefed up its regulatory capability to the extent that many institutions are now increasingly fretting about the perils of overregulation.  

As such, when I made my way to the Central Bank’s glistening HQ overlooking the River Liffey (the fact that no one comments anymore that the site was supposed to house Anglo says it all about how much time has passed), it was a little like going back in time.

After all, the publication of the report comes 15 years after the Central Bank began an investigation into Irish Nationwide’s commercial lending in Ireland, Belfast, and London between 2004 and 2008, and 10 years after the establishment a statutory inquiry by the Central Bank to “independently inquire” into the building society and five people involved in its management.

Since then, the Central Bank has reached settlement agreements with three of the original five – former INBS chairman Michael Walsh, one-time head of commercial lending Tom McMenamin and former head of UK commercial lending Gary McCollum.

The action against the society’s controversial CEO, Michael Fingleton, who ran the lender like a personal fiefdom, was dropped in December 2019, due to his ill health. Fingleton, known ubiquitously as ‘Fingers’, is now 86 and is still pursued in other litigation arising out of his stewardship of INBS.

Last week, as it closed out the loop, the regulator said it had sanctioned the society’s former finance director, John Stanley Purcell, for his role in breaches by INBS of financial services law between 2004 and 2008. Purcell has been disqualified for four years from being concerned in the management of any regulated financial service provider, directed to pay a €130,000 penalty and reprimanded for his conduct.

The report also validated and reinforced what is widely known about Irish Nationwide – it continually issued large sums to developers without proper paperwork, security and internal approvals, while it also sought to cut itself in as a partner on development projects to the extent that profit share lending eventually represented 65 per cent of INBS’s commercial loan book by value by June 2008.

The inquiry cited examples of numerous large loans being approved at single board meetings. This  38 loans, involving more than €500 million, which were approved at the October 2006 board meeting.

There is nothing we did not already know – much of the detail is contained in Fingers, a 2013 book by Tom and the business journalist Richard Curran. 

Reinforcing what we already knew came at a steep cost. Documents released by the Central Bank today show that the regulator spent €4.9 million on external costs on its initial investigation between 2010 and 2015. Some €16.5 million went on external costs for the inquiry itself between 2025 and 2025, mostly directed towards legal fees. A further €2.7 million went on litigation costs. All told, the Central Bank spent more than €24 million on its investigation and inquiry into regulatory breaches at the collapsed lender.

“How on earth has it cost this much and taken this long?” one senior government source asked me last week. 

In truth, it cost so much because it took so long. 

Fingleton and Purcell challenged the very right of the bank to hold the Inquiry in the first place. The Central Bank won, but it added years to the process. Covid-19 did not help either. 

But the delayed nature of the process sadly undermines the work of the Inquiry. At the press briefing last week, most of the other journalists in the room were still in secondary school when the bank failed; it was almost like a history lesson.

And while sanctions are serious for those still actively working, many people have long since retired. 

Colm Kincaid, the Central Bank’s director of enforcement, insisted last week that despite the cost and the duration, the Inquiry was “absolutely” worth it.

However, the more he spoke, there was a feeling that it was worth it because it set new pathways for how such probes will work going forward. First, the High Court validated its right to hold the Inquiry, while it also bolstered its tech and admin support to ensure it could deal with the voluminous amount of paperwork and submissions required to investigate. 

“The procedures developed by the Inquiry provided the foundation for the procedures adopted in subsequent inquiries and informed the development by the Central Bank of the 2023 Administrative Sanctions Procedure Guidelines. Experience from the Inquiry also positively influenced the Central Bank’s investment in technology, in-house investigative, legal and data management capabilities, and its own premises for holding inquiry hearings. These capabilities contribute to the smoother running of Central Bank investigations and inquiries, which now require far less external assistance,” the Central Bank said. 

The Central bank also said that the action showed it would hold senior bankers responsible. This is, of course, a good thing, but it is far from ideal that it took 15 years to close out the probe.

Hopefully, the Central Bank is right. Hopefully, it now has the legal framework and the intellectual wherewithal to investigate banks and bankers. 

Otherwise, we have simply spent a lot of time and a lot of money reinforcing what we knew- INBS was a badly managed, busted flush.

Elsewhere last week…

Noel Ruane and Trevor Parsons have helped build some of Ireland’s biggest tech successes. Now, they’ve teamed up to launch Bronto, a start-up determined to modernise how the world handles log data at scale. They told Tom why they believe it is a multibillion-dollar opportunity.

Ireland has a complicated relationship with institutional property investment firms. And nowhere is this more evident than in the area of Irish real estate trusts (Irefs). Irefs were established in 2017 to channel foreign investment into Irish property. However, as I reported last week, investment in themIrefs is cooling. I examined the context and the most recent data. 

Don O’Neill doesn’t speak in slogans. He speaks in stories — slow-burning, salt-air-soaked, stitched through with a kind of quiet resolve. Raised in the small seaside town of Ballyheigue, CoCounty Kerry, O’Neill grew up sketching gowns in secret, dreaming of runways far from the Atlantic’s reach. In the second episode of Arts Matters, he spoke with Alison.