After decades of enquiry after enquiry into corruption - enquiries that never tracked down the guilty parties - the Irish government hit on a sure-fire way to establish the truth behind the decision to pledge the income of the Irish working class to guarantee the wealth of the banks and bondholders.

The answer was: a banking enquiry!

The result was predictable. A number of retired politicians and bankers expressed perfunctory apologies and remarked that there had been a failure of regulation.

David Drumm, former CEO of Anglo, offered a chat over videolink from New York. When this was refused a written statement was provided. However the DPP ruled that the statement could not be published until they completed their own enquiry.

The exercise ended in confusion with the report postponed. The enquiry itself was enquired into when a whistleblower reported that the witnesses had been coached in advance with questions and prepared answers.

The whole performance was met with a wave of apathy. Irish workers understand very clearly that they have been sacrificed to the interests of the bankers. However no alternative to the rule of gombeen capitalism has been presented and they tend to accept the argument that economic weakness means that we must bow down to the rule of the transnationals and the Troika.

The local kleptocracy steal openly, but are protected by a cloak of invisibility. Stopping them seems beyond the power of the workers, so they turn aside and pretend not to see.

One participant in the enquiry had an extra cloak of invisibility. David Begg, former secretary of ICTU and the Trade Union representative on the central bank, presented a fireside chat. The Troika were neoliberal ideologues. The IMF were pleasant. There was a failure of regulation.

Given that Begg was the regulator representing the workers, some questions should have been asked. One question would be why ICTU pre-dated billionaire Denis O'Brien in threatening RTE with legal action when a Socialist Democracy supporter queried his role in a phone-in.

The trade union leadership have no questions - Begg was operating their policy of collusion. The socialist groups have no questions - they have signed up to an alliance with the bureaucrats around building a fairer version of capitalism. Yet the failure to question Begg blocks a serious challenge to Irish capital and is a major part of the cloak of invisibility and impunity.

All mechanisms wear out. The banking enquiry was meant to reassure the workers. The debacle fuels growing anger. The tensions of the class struggle will pierce the cloak of invisibility and at that point the workers will seek their revenge.