Although tomorrow marks the first anniversary of the bank guarantee, many people at the top of the banking business and their political allies are still convinced that if only they can get NAMA through, it will be back to business as usual.

The bulk of Ireland’s subsequent banking problems have flowed from that fatal and flawed decision. Tomorrow should be a day for sober reflection for the government. They must realise that proceeding with NAMA on a wing and a prayer, just as they did with the bank guarantee, could put the country in hock for generations.

In hindsight, it is now clear that Fianna Fáil’s tactics on the banking crisis have been to nationalise the losses, get the taxpayer to carry the can and allow the bankers to continue their outlandish reward system. The ‘toxic triangle’ is still in place.

Anglo Irish Bank was at the epicentre of Ireland’s evolving banking crisis, and it was the fear that this developers’ bank might collapse that forced the government’s hand and led them to implement the blanket bank guarantee. The assertion that Anglo was a systemically important bank was never credible.

The acknowledgement by the Department of Finance, reportedly in correspondence with the EU Commission, that the €4bn pumped into Anglo Irish Bank is essentially dead money will come as a bitter pill to ordinary taxpayers being asked to pay the bill. Ironically, €4bn is the government’s stated target for budget-day spending cuts and tax hikes.

On this, the first anniversary, the government should set up a Dáil DIRT-style inquiry to establish in detail who were the guilty men – and they were mostly men – who managed through greed and wilful optimism to do so much damage to families and communities right across the country.

Finding out what went wrong is essential if the mistakes of the past are not to be repeated.

There is a phrase knocking about in the City of London – BaB’s, which means ‘Bonus’ are Back’ and which exemplifies the determination of senior bankers to get back to the bonus and risk-taking culture that brought the Irish and international financial systems to ruin.

The reality is that if we are to get credit flowing again to businesses, we need to return to a more staid and less risky banking culture that is fairly and robustly regulated.

The pursuit of short-term shareholder value will be a blind alley, not just for Irish banks, but for most of the international banking system. When the two Brian’s, Cowen and Lenihan, introduced the blanket bank guarantee, they boasted that this quick fix for the Irish economy would be the cheapest bank bailout in the world. Like Lenihan’s promise to the Fianna Fáil Ard Fheis that Ireland would be the first country out of recession, these were fool’s promises. N