Bankers must create 'climate of responsibility', says Archbishop

ARCHBISHOP OF Dublin Dr Diarmuid Martin says bankers have to create “a climate of responsibility from within”.

He added that “they have responsibilities not just to themselves, their boardrooms and investors, but to economic and social sustainability”.

Speaking to The Irish Times at the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Dr Martin said: “Morals and ethics cannot be injected from the outside.”

A financial system with too much money will “try to lend that money somewhere”, he said. “There has been clearly irresponsible lending and irresponsible management of lending.”

The recession would cause “enormous harm to the weakest”, said Dr Martin. He described the spate of job losses announced in recent weeks as “phenomenal”.

“Those who have done very well in recent years will do comparatively well in the time of a recession but it is those who have been brought in to this precipice of precariousness and have been living on that precipice who will find it very hard.

“They won’t be simply be the traditional poor. It will be people who have very high mortgages and have been living very close to the brink. They could find themselves in very serious difficulty.”

He said that in the past Ireland could replace lost jobs with qualitatively better employment but that this could not happen today.

“You have people who – to put it crudely – haven’t the remotest idea where the Labour Exchange is because they never in their life thought they would be going on to the Live Register. They are also psychologically not prepared for it.”

Dr Martin said that the Irish property market in recent years “had a pathology in it which people suspected but didn’t identify.”

“Like any pathology, if it is left grow and develop, you suddenly find that it is much more intricate and it spread far wider than anybody imagined,” he said.

Dr Martin, who has attended the annual Davos think-in on nine occasions, will be speaking in a discussion about privacy in a growing digital world and meeting other church leaders during his visit.

Responding to criticism of the Davos gathering by Irish Times columnist Vincent Browne, Dr Martin said: “The business and financial community are part of the problem but they are also part of the solution.”