Exasperated,  Pat Kenny asked on Frontline Monday night, why the several billions we've put into the banks to buffer against consumer insolvency, hasn't yet been used? Nobody answered the question. Given that the IMF has been unequivocal in its view that no domestic economic recovery can occur without first tackling consumer insolvency, it remains the burning question of our time.

Four years into the crisis and why do we not have yet a non-judicial and modern insolvency process?  The answer is simple and grubby; those at the top simply didn't  care. Insolvency doesn't affect them, only the private sector and the low paid in the public sector. Instead they are snuggly quarantined within the ruling pale buttressed by the Croke Park Agreement. This lethargy and lack of urgency at the top is helped enormously when fear  and ignorance is spread by the high priests of moral hazard, those who feel threatened by the scale of insolvency that includes banks and their right wing protectorate in the media.

But now that the Insolvency Bill, which is joined at the hip to the Troika bailout, has arrived, the objective of this hard right cluster is to render it toothless, a mere box ticking exercise that releases the minimum amount of funds into the maw of the consumer insolvency crisis. Let's hope they fail.

The key performance indicator for economic recovery will be the number of debt settlement and insolvency agreements that will be lodged with the proposed Insolvency Service attached to the Dept of Justice. But without robust Central Bank adjustment of the Code of Conduct for banks, compelling them to fairly engage with Insolvency Trustees and the creation of an Ombudsman to arbitrate on disputes between debtors and creditors, the Irish economy is directionless, propelled forward by exports but dragging, on the sea floor, a domestic economy deeply anchored in the silt of unresolved consumer debt. Getting it right isn't just about economic recovery, it's also about recovery from trauma.

Nobody is measuring it, but the impact of prolonged exposure to open-ended and overwhelming indebtedness is mauling Irish society by destroying family cohesion and happiness and, in many cases, leading to separation and suicides. Further delay is intolerable because, not only is it economically stupid but because it is inflicting horrendous wounds on thousands of Irish families.

- Eddie

The Central Bank is poised to take enforcement action against most leading Irish lenders for duping vast numbers of Irish borrowers into paying for worthless Payment Protection Insurance (PPI). This cover can temporarily pay your loan and mortgage if you get sick or lose your job. Attaching it to a credit agreement reduces risk to the lender and pays lucrative commissions typically 40% of the premium, usually priced at 6% of annual mortgage repayments. The scam, which is set to cost the UK lending industry £8 billion, is the failure to disclose the sale of the insurance to borrowers many of whom simply don't know they are paying hundreds of Euro per year for it or where it has been disclosed, the failure to explain its exemptions, terms and costs.

But huge compensation payouts for PPI mis-sold in Ireland may be scuppered because the Central Bank cannot legally apply its enforcement powers before it first introduced a detailed Code of Conduct in 2007. That means a deluge of claims will fall to the Financial Services Ombudsman (FSO) when consumers twig they've  been scammed.

But unless the FSO seeks  a simple adjustment to its six year rule, any claims about PPI unknowingly entered into over six years ago will be repudiated by it. The six year rule can be changed by simple Ministerial order or by a High Court ruling to run the clock from the date that consumers recognise the loss, not from the inception of the mis-sold policy.

So will the FSO fall victim to the classic civil service crisis response of shrinking the scale of the problem to fit its resources or will it gear up and take on the big boys guaranteeing to rule on any PPI mis-selling within three years of consumer knowledge? The moment of truth has arrived for the Ombudsman. How it jumps will determine its legacy.

- Eddie

A 77 year old man takes the Luas to St Stephens Green, walks to the Dail gates and, in what his daughter would later describe as his final political act, commits a very public suicide. It could, but didn't happen in Dublin but, it did happen in Athens. Dimitris Christoulos suicide has lifted the lid on the excruciating disillusionment and hopelessness of extend and pretend policies that have failed to tackle the personal insolvency crisis. A week after Mr Christoulos finally ended his debt burden in front of the Greek parliament, the IMF singled out excessive personal debt as the brake preventing economic recovery.

 Mr Christoulos, a retired pharmacist and anti-drugs activist is an anathema to the let-them-burn brigade, who’d prefer rigid adherence to the failed financial dogma of moral hazard, the policy of avoiding debt restructure and relief at all costs - especially costs to them. But by taking his own life Mr Christoulos has helped to strip away the detachment between those lightly bruised by this economic depression and those overwhelmed by it.

Rage and there has been much of it, has been focused on bankers, developers, bailout rescuers and better off neighbours but, strip away the rhetoric, look past the dumb decision to bail out banks with daft promissory notes and, Ireland ninety six years after The Easter Rising is a failed State, measured harshly by our savage annual deficit. Perhaps it is because of low self- esteem that we think don’t deserve higher standards or perhaps it is a hangover from colonisation where pulling strokes on authorities made some kind of sense but, whatever the cause, we accepted crony capitalism, cheered political corruption, voted Ahern back a third time chuckling at his Tribunal evidence, accepted zero accountability from a vastly expanded and grossly overpaid public service establishment, ignored cartels in the professions and impunity for political leaders - until we were burst. Then it became personal.

Broach this subject and even today, despite everything that has happened, many of us still don't want to consider that the enemy is within. Ireland is unreformed. We are still a society run for the benefit of cosseted insiders. Just look at the Croke Park Agreement and its political support. Look at the Household Charge, money collected to feed into an unreformed and bloated local services network where sickies run at multiples of what would be tolerated elsewhere.

This week we hear from teacher unions who, despite cuts, enjoy among the highest rates of pay and pensions in Europe, openly threatening us if their privileges are reduced. All these, report to a political elite whose own pay and pensions are vastly in excess of what we can afford as a broken State, summed up by the obscene fiction that we can pay over a hundred billion in pensions from an asset pot that's gone down the crapper into failed banks.

Meanwhile at least a quarter of a million Irish people, just like Dimitris Christolous, are behind on utilities and mortgages, practically all of them from the private sector, some from the low paid public sector and all excluded from the economy while the squeezed middle is bled for more money - rather than face the truth.

The truth is that even if we regain a foothold in bond markets next year, we continue to feed an economy that is run, primarily, to maintain the lifestyles to which the insiders have become accustomed in a democracy that maintains the delusion that its centre of power is its parliament.

You want to learn how this broken State operates, seek out the untouchables, those who get paid most for the least effort and decide the fate of the rest of us. That is real power. The rest is mere window dressing. When the Brits left we merely swapped an oppressive foreign occupier for an internal one and when the Trioka leaves, we will remain colonised.

- Eddie Hobbs