President Mary McAleese has criticised lawyers, economists and regulators for their role in the economic crisis and said professionals must be “hard-wired to behave ethically”.
Speaking to students at the St Petersburg State University of Economics and Finance in Russia, she said the economic flux had raised questions about how legal regulation could be made stronger to avoid future financial crises.
“It was long argued . . . that heavy regulation, strong-handed regulation was not the most conducive environment for business, and yet we know to our cost that light regulation was a recipe for trouble,” she said.
If we were to avoid the extremes of economic boom and boost we needed smart and rigorous regulatory systems that also allowed commerce to flourish.
“We need professional people who are hard-wired to behave ethically, to think ethically, to act ethically, to respect the requirements of compliance, to understand they are in the public interest, to see themselves as operating in the broad public interest,” she said.
“And so we need people who are trained to think about the longitudinal consequences of their decisions and not just the lateral or immediate short term gains.”
Mrs McAleese said legal academics, economists and practitioners needed to work closely together to better understand the technical complexities of financial systems and make their operations more accessible to the average citizen. Then we could render “their sometimes impenetrable transactions - and frankly sometimes deliberately impenetrable transactions - more amenable to effective regulation”, she said.
The president said the education and training process in these professions also needed to be re-examined. “I have long been of the view that the teaching of law and of our legal rights and responsibilities as citizens should never be kept like some kind of fine vintage wine, simply for the consumption of college students of law, but rather should be given in childhood, should be given in our schools, should be given in our homes and should be available to all so that law doesn’t come as a surprise to us much later in life.”
The president’s comments on the economic crisis follow remarks she made in New York in May when she said the cuts in public spending had had real and very painful effects on families and people were “mad as hell”.
She was speaking on the penultimate day of her five-day State visit to Russia. Earlier today, Mrs McAleese held a meeting with the governor of St Petersburg, Valentina Matvienko, at Sheremetevsky Palace.
She is regularly described as one of the most powerful women in Russia and has close political ties to Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin. Ms Matvienko said she hoped Irish business people would come to do business in St Petersburg, which was a dynamic and developing city.