Importance of the appointments process

A memorable passage
from When
Irish eyes are crying, the story of Ireland's economic
disaster by Michael Lewis, in Vanity Fair:

...the dominant narrative inside the head of the average Irish
citizen -- and his receptiveness to the story Kelly was telling -- changed
at roughly 10 o'clock in the evening on October 2, 2008. On that
night, Ireland's financial regulator, a lifelong Central Bank
bureaucrat in his 60s named Patrick Neary, came live on national
television to be interviewed. The interviewer sounded as if he had
just finished reading the collected works of Morgan Kelly. Neary, for
his part, looked as if he had been dragged from a hole into which he
badly wanted to return. He wore an insecure little mustache, stammered
rote answers to questions he had not been asked, and ignored the ones
he had been asked.

A banking system is an act of faith: it survives only for as long as
people believe it will. Two weeks earlier the collapse of Lehman
Brothers had cast doubt on banks everywhere. Ireland?s banks had not
been managed to withstand doubt; they had been managed to exploit
blind faith. Now the Irish people finally caught a glimpse of the guy
meant to be safeguarding them: the crazy uncle had been sprung from
the family cellar. Here he was, on their televisions, insisting that
the Irish banks were ``resilient'' and ``more than adequately
capitalized'' ... when everyone in Ireland could see, in the vacant
skyscrapers and empty housing developments around them, evidence of
bank loans that were not merely bad but insane. ``What happened was
that everyone in Ireland had the idea that somewhere in Ireland there
was a little wise old man who was in charge of the money, and this was
the first time they'd ever seen this little man,'' says McCarthy. ``And
then they saw him and said, Who the fuck was that??? Is that the
fucking guy who is in charge of the money??? That's when everyone
panicked.''