Sitting with three bankers in a Dublin hotel over Christmas, I couldn't escape the irony that they were drinking a sauvignon blanc (costing €40) called Sherwood. Pointing out the wine label and drawing parallels between the bankers and the robber barons of lore was too obvious to resist but when questioned they were confident they'd all still be in their jobs by the end of this year.

And after that too. After all, the people in the banks' property divisions would always be needed to answer questions on loan documents.

However revelations in the Sunday Tribune that Anglo Irish Bank gave out property loans without any valuations is sure to increase worries over the securities and methods used by the Irish banks when assessing lending during the property bubble. In an attempt to scale up, it's clear that the Irish banks let standards slip and we are all paying the consequences. This was obviously an issue for the regulator but the question still arises whether any of the people on Anglo's credit committee can be charged with reckless trading if these loans given without valuations default? Exceptional circumstances or not, surely there was a duty of care to shareholders to partake in proper due diligence?

When Nama was being set up we were told that banks' loan books showed that the majority of individual loans are bespoke and had different legal documentation. We're now finding out that bespoke meant cut to fit, and the implications are only coming home to roost as a result because it is only now that the lenders are finding out how difficult it is to determine their level of security over assets, given that many of the larger development deals were financed by a syndicate of lenders.

Earlier this month Mr Justice Peter Kelly said he was astonished and found it ''extraordinary'' that AIB had loaned over half a billion euro to property developer Liam Carroll on the back of letters of undertaking from his solicitors that they were holding the deeds in trust. We may find that was only the beginning and that the can of worms around lending practices is only starting to be opened.

As a result, it should be one of the first lines of inquiry into the Irish banking crisis by Klaus Regling.