Ground Floor/Sheila O'Flanagan: Over the past number of years, the issue of corporate governance and good practice has been headline material for many business magazines and newspapers.

Having discovered that a surprising number of businessmen with the Midas touch were, in fact, dealing from a stacked deck, we have demanded reform in the boardroom and greater honesty from business leaders.

We want the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth and then, when we get it, we don't like it very much. Matt Barrett, the Kerry-born Canadian chief executive of Barclays Bank, leaped into a vat of boiling water when he told the truth about credit card borrowing last week. At a session with a UK treasury select committee on credit card costs, he said it was an expensive way to borrow and that he would not recommend to anyone that they chronically borrow on credit cards.

Not rocket science you'd think, since every money makeover programme immediately forces the participants to take the scissors to their cards, but cue hysteria in the ranks of credit card holders who apparently called Barclaycard in droves to complain about the comments (and the rate of interest they're being charged).

Cue also anger from the employees who work with Barclaycard and who found themselves at the short end of those customer comments and who might or might not have been appeased by Mr Barrett's hastily written memo to them in which he told them that it was an exceptional business.

And cue Barrett's induction into the Corporate Blunder Hall of Fame, alongside Gerald (our products are crap) Ratner and Brian (we all suck) Valentine, a senior vice-president at Microsoft whose own scintillating comments came at a meeting about software security at which he admitted that Microsoft products weren't actually engineered for security.

Thinking about it rationally, they were all speaking the truth. Credit cards are an awful way of borrowing money for anything other than the short term and nobody in their right minds should use them as a substitute for a term loan. Ratner's jewellery products might not have been total crap but they were certainly not designed to be locked away in the family vault in order to provide a decent inheritance for the kids.

And Microsoft - well, you know my views on its creaky and unreliable operating system which acts as a magnet for disenfranchised computer hackers everywhere.

Mr Barrett's colleagues were rushing to his defence last week, saying that the level of questioning coming from the select committee was inappropriate and that his comments were being taken out of context. And they tried to play down the fact that his take-home pay is around £1.7 million (€2.4 million) a year, which means that his need for a personal Barclaycard is fairly minimal.

You'd imagine, however, that for the kind of money Mr Barrett is raking in, he'd manage to forget about honesty and tell the select committee what they expected to hear. Which was that credit cards are not ruinously expensive when used as they were intended to be used and that the exorbitant interest rates cover the costs of unrecoverable debts and those people who pay in full before the end of the interest period.

What he should also have told them was that people who couldn't afford to pay wouldn't be able to obtain a Barclaycard - but that's where the whole deck of plastic comes tumbling down because, of course, the banks are happily handing out cards to people who should be attending Shoppers Anonymous clinics.

More worryingly for Barrett is not anger about his perfectly reasonable comments on credit card costs, but the fact that it has drawn further attention to Barclays at a time when it doesn't really want it. This is because, flying in the face of the Higgs report on corporate governance, Barclays has nominated him to move from chief executive to chairman in just over a year's time, thus handing him a three-day-a-week job at a salary of more than half-a-million pounds a year.

Corporate governance is a tricky issue. It shouldn't be, but it is and it's the same whether you're talking about companies in the UK, Europe the US or, indeed, in Ireland. There are too few directors sitting on the boards of too many companies without the skills and the interest to know exactly what's going on. There are not enough checks and balances at boardroom level to ensure that the company is always acting in the best interests of its shareholders.

Of course, all of the directors will say that they give their full attention to everything that comes before them. But the key to knowing what's going on is being able to ask the right question - but if you don't have all the information that's probably the hardest thing to do.

Corporate executives don't want their decisions scrutinised by non-executives, not necessarily because they are wrong or illegal, but because every time someone questions a decision we are forced to justify it both to them and to ourselves. And it can be time-wasting when you have to go through, in all its fine detail, issues with which someone outside the business isn't familiar.

And presumably, that's how Matt Barrett felt when he was being grilled by the treasury select committee and why he snapped and told the truth. The members of the select committee weren't amused. The bankers around the table were probably cursing him under their breaths.

Presumably if a clerk made a gaffe - like approving a too-high credit limit for a serial borrower - he or she would be mulling over future job options. It'll be instructive to see whether Mr Barrett's brush with the truth costs him at the end of the day.

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