In all the drama surrounding the 'black Thursday' announcements at the end of last month, when finance minister Brian Lenihan revealed that AIB was being effectively nationalised and Anglo Irish Bank could ultimately cost up to €34bn, a crucial bit of information of great interest to the markets and taxpayers went unmentioned.

On 30 September, €7.9bn of Anglo's senior bonds were redeemed in full by the bank, but nobody with a say in the bank's operations – not the management, not the Department of Finance, not the Central Bank and not the National Treasury Management Agency – bothered to announce the news. In fact, it seemed to those trying to find out what happened to Anglo's maturing bonds that there was an effort to keep it quiet for some reason.

This is peculiar because, as the bank stated last week, the bond redemptions were a part of normal funding operations. The bonds were guaranteed and coming due and had to be replaced with new funding – in this case, with Central Bank borrowings. That's fine. As finance minister Brian Lenihan has said many times, the state does not have the legal authority to inflict losses on senior bondholders – not without what he says would be dire consequences.

Yet it took three weeks of persistent questioning by former banker Peter Mathews for the facts to emerge. Mathews was initially stonewalled by the Central Bank; the Sunday Tribune made several calls to Anglo over a two-week period, none of which were returned. The Central Bank has a policy of not commenting on funding operations, but the off-the-record message was that Dame Street was not involved or that there was nothing unusual about Anglo redeeming billions in bonds at par anyway.

Indeed, it is not unusual to redeem bonds at par, but we are living in unusual times. In fact, the big debate in the weeks leading up to the bond redemption was whether or not senior bondholders in Anglo should be forced to bear some of the bank's outrageous losses. Under those circumstances, it appears a decision not to disclose the deal was strategic and a matter of political expediency. This is dismaying given everything we've been led to believe about the reform of Ireland's financial system. Here we had a nationalised bank doing a major – supposedly normal – deal about which both the department and Central Bank had to be aware, but this simple fact had to be painfully extracted over the course of three weeks.

The reticence regarding this basic information by three independent parties – Anglo, the Central Bank and the department – suggests a worrying reversion to a subservient 'yes minister' posture which characterised the country's collapse into financial anarchy during the boom. After all the assurances about no more business as usual, these shenanigans felt depressingly familiar.