Surely you left out Rody Molloy of Fás who, during an era of full employment, managed to get through a budget of €1bn of taxpayers money. Beggars belief.

Judy Burke

Your 'The men who dug the hole' is spot-on for its identification of the culprits who were active since the beginning of the boom in mid-1990s. But, with the exception of Garret FitzGerald, the only politics-economics commentator still around who was active from its Whitaker beginnings in 1958, I suggest that you naturally failed to spot two key sets of culprits.

Both sets saw that greed would make the current debacle inevitable, and both failed to focus enough on that.

One set included commentators of the FitzGerald variety. He was told in 1959 that unless political policies included measures to restrain greed, economic development efforts would be self-defeating.

The second set is our Catholic theology guides, specifically the Dublin and Armagh archbishops since 1958. After all, virtually – if not all – of the 24 persons you name, and FitzGerald, are products of Catholic Sunday preaching and Catholic schools. So too are the electorate and commentators who supported and tolerated their activities. All were utterly without Catholic theology guidance in relation to greed.

Joseph F Foyle, Dublin 6

Great article and well researched. I would give my vote of number 25 to Rody Molloy (right) the disgraced Fás executive whose reckless profligacy as a public servant paralleled with his political cronies and the ethos in the boardrooms of the supposed financial cognoscenti.

Aidan Daly

The missing 25th is the senior public service.

We are all aware of the succession of reports on bad management, and in at least one case, long-standing illegality on the part of the central government. This incompetence has been documented in reports of tribunals, the Comptroller and Auditor General, Dáil committees and other inquiries. Some examples that spring to mind are:

• The illegal charging of over 300,000 people in nursing homes over 28 years. This gave rise to a major financial, legal and administrative problem that was entirely avoidable.

• The indifferent response to the hepatitis C scandal

• The PPars project expenditure of €131m up to August 2005

• The €50m spent on e-voting machines

• Poor management of integrated ticketing for public transport in Dublin area, on which another €50m has been spent by the public sector

• The failure to act on advice from many international bodies on the management of the economy.

Donal O Brolcháin