We saw the first bank run in 150 years as people fearfully queued up outside of Northern Rock because they no longer trusted the institution. We saw the former national airline drop its Shannon routes on a bank holiday weekend in the dog days of summer, six weeks after the Department of Transport's top official was told of the Aer Lingus plan.

And last week we saw a cancer at the heart of the Celtic Tiger property boom exposed in all its wretchedness.

Solicitors-turned-property-developers on the run.

Banks crowding the High Court bench, elbowing each other aside to be first in line as creditors, having learned that different banks had been duped into lending tens of millions of euro on the same property.

Somewhere in the background, individual investors in certain overseas property schemes come to the slow, icy realisation about the money they gave that trustworthy fella for a piece of that allweather resort in Bulgaria he was building. After all, he was a solicitor. What could go wrong?

Trust is the midpoint between ignorance and certainty that allows us to deal with other people with confidence. It's easy to forget that the difference between prosperous modern capitalist economies and aboriginal barter systems is the systems and institutions of trust we've built up over the millennia.

Babylonians came up with the idea of the notary public, the idea that you could entrust part of the authority of the state in a trusted individual who would serve as an unimpeachable witness to, amongst other things, transactions of property. Banks as we understand them are a far more recent innovation, once medieval financiers found a loophole in Biblical admonitions against usury. Come to that, money itself only has value because we trust that it does and that it will be accepted by others.

The more trust relationships a society has, the better off it tends to be. If I can trust the bank with my money, it can go off and help finance the building of houses and roads, help people to start new companies. If I can trust a solicitor to register a mortgage against a property, it saves a lot of time and money.

The scandal involving Michael Lynn, Thomas Byrne and the other as yet unnamed solicitors of the Law Society is not just a matter of curiosity and titillation, though it has that in spades. For 20 years, solicitors have been given extraordinary latitude in property transactions. The vast majority of solicitors trusted with that power used it responsibly. But if the worst fears of the banks and investors are confirmed, the abuse of trust committed by these few strikes at the very heart of not just our prosperity but the rule of law itself.

The consequences? On a global scale this year, we saw big international banks simply stop believing what other banks were saying about how much exposure they had to the American mortgage market. One day in August, the international credit markets 'seized up', which is to say they simply stopped functioning.

No one trusted each other enough to carry on trading.

The fact Dublin was home to the majority of these dodgy debt securities is dismissed by those in authority who would rather you pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, but that's a trust issue for another day.

The "credit crunch" that ensued led directly to the spasm that convulsed Northern Rock. It couldn't get money to continue its operations, ultimately leading to the collapse of trust in the bank and queues of worried people as long as any this side of the Weimar Republic.

Less dramatically, the real cost of money has gone up, for mortgage borrowers, property developers and anybody else trying to start a business.

So what about our local trust-busting banks and lawyers? The fallout is unclear. One worrying sign is that, anecdotally, the Land Registry is seeing a small increase in people . . . solicitors, mostly . . . coming to their public window, rather than registering mortgages by post.

If actual property buyers start coming in, just to make sure they actually own the roof under which they tuck their children into bed at night, we can only stand back and watch the bonfire of our folly.

As anybody who's been burned before knows well, trust lost is hard to regain.