The external review of the decision-making process in the Department of Finance announced last week is welcome but is an entirely inadequate response to the principle of transparency within government generally.

The review's purpose is to find out whether there is any truth in the two charges most commonly thrown at the Department of Finance following the collapse of the banks and the economy – that its officials were either incompetent or complacent, or both.

The Finance mandarins have denied this strenuously, arguing they warned of the ballooning property bubble on many occasions and counselled against the dangers of over-relying for income on taxes gleaned from construction and property. If that's the case, then they'll have nothing to fear.

But a review of this kind is surely nothing more than good housekeeping. If things have gone wrong in any business or venture, then a critical audit of decisions made is always undertaken in order to highlight lessons that need to be learned.

Central Bank governor Professor Patrick Honohan has already provided an even-handed and rigorous overview of what went wrong in terms of policy-making and regulation, sparing no blushes within the Central Bank itself. Klaus Regling and Max Watson have shown how poor governance and management in the banks let risk-taking get totally out of hand.

The review of the Department of Finance is all the more important because of its unique position: its staff have served one dominant political party for more than two decades. Fianna Fáil-led coalitions have dominated economic policy for so long, it is understandable that civil servants could well have been contaminated by the 'group think' that infected all those with any sort of responsibility for our economic wellbeing over the recent past.

This team of outsiders will blow some fresh air into the work practices, analysis and policy-making expertise in Finance.

To admit failings is a strength, not a weakness, especially if there is a willingness to put them right. The country's leading economic commentator, the Economic and Social Research Institute, last week said it could have done better with regard to forecasts and ruefully acknowledged that it had a lack of expertise in macro-economics and in banking, which meant it lacked the specialist knowledge to see the banking crisis coming.

The Department of Finance recently conducted its own review of its capacity to clean up our ongoing financial mess. As one commentator put it, the internal report had a great welcome for itself. But it did acknowledge that they needed to upskill and diversify. Over half its staff have degrees in arts rather than economics. It draws on little or no outside business and banking experience and a radical restructuring will be needed because so many senior personnel are retiring, either because of their age or, in a self-inflicted wound, as a result of the government's cost-cutting incentivised retirement scheme.

The value of an external review of past performance is that judgements about decision-making and the internal systems are freed from the bonds of self-justification and can stimulate new ways of problem-solving and analysis.

But it must not lay the blame for mistakes on the civil servants alone. They are the servants of the politicians. The 'Yes Minister' picture of civil servants pulling the strings of their political masters hardly holds water with regard to the last three ministers for finance. Charlie McCreevy, Bertie Ahern and Brian Cowen were three of the strongest and most powerful political voices in the country for more than a decade. When they barked, the Department of Finance tail wagged.

It is on their heads that final responsibility must lie.

Superficially, it is encouraging that this sort of review of the normally hidden workings of our most powerful government department is actually taking place. But these lookbacks are a far cry from the transparency we need regarding the daily decisions taken in our name and with taxpayers' money.

There was a 51% increase in the number of Freedom of Information requests to the Department of Finance last year, yet the facts about key policies which are costing the taxpayer billions are still shrouded in mystery. We still don't know what happened on the night of the bank guarantee and it looks like we won't be allowed to know unless, possibly, we're generously bestowed, perhaps in 10 years' time, with a retrospective review.

By that time, how many more billions on top of the €22bn already flushed down the Anglo drain will we have lost?

Unfortunately, the contempt with which even the newer players within the banking and finance echelons still regard the public was depressingly transparent recently in the unlikely personage of new chairman, Alan Dukes.

His arrogance, naked rudeness and lack of cooperation with Senator Shane Ross during his appearance at the Oireachtas Committee on Finance was an insult to the taxpayers who fund the bank and pay the salaries. Requests for information on appointments, salaries and bonuses are perfectly legitimate and Dukes's failure to cooperate smacked of haughty self-importance and was a far cry from the democratic principles we all thought were the stuff of the former Fine Gael leader's political DNA.

They were a far cry too from Professor Honohan's view, expressed when he presented his own report on the banking crisis to the same committee, that "things should not be suppressed or covered up in some way".

Last week, it was revealed that the first request to Nama for a hand-out ("working capital") has come from Real Estate Opportunities, a development company mostly owned by Johnny Ronan and Richard Barrett's Treasury Holdings, as it works out complex arrangements to fund the redevelopment of its vanity purchase of Battersea Power Station in London, a massive, multi-billion pound project fraught with problems. What's difficult for Nama is the fact that Treasury is synonymous in the taxpayer's mind with Johnny Ronan, he of the private jet, €650,000 Maybach car, on-off relationship with Glenda Gilson and spur-of-the-moment €65,000 overnight break in Marrakech with Rosanna Davison.

Nama boss Frank Daly may have recently warned developers that they will have to adjust their lifestyles to suit their squeezed pockets if they look to Nama for help. But tough soundbites and soothing platitudes are a wholly inadequate response to what's beginning to stink of a developer bailout, something everyone insisted Nama would never dirty its hands with.

We need facts about what Nama's role in the REO/Treasury deal is to be. We need facts about whether the loans they have bought are being paid back, and if not, what steps they are taking to recover money from people whose lifestyles imply they have huge resources. Yet, as of now, the toxic bank's overall business plan has yet to be published, let alone the individual business plans it works out with ailing developers with their begging bowls outstretched.

The reasoning behind all these decisions can't be left to some review to take place in a decade's time after Nama has been wound up. Nama is not covered by the Freedom of Information Act, ostensibly to give it greater commercial freedom. Ultimately, however that secrecy will hamper its progress because it undermines public trust in its ability to succeed rather than maintains it. Transparency is not a retrospective gift. It is a democratic cornerstone.