The report into the banking crisis by international experts Klaus Regling and Max Watson has concluded that, in various ways, official policies and bank governance failings seriously exacerbated Ireland's credit and property boom and depleted its fiscal and banking buffers when the crisis struck.
They say that by mid-decade, the financial and property boom in Ireland presented features in which financial stability analysis should have sounded alarm bells loudly.
Domestic financial stability reporting by the central bank failed in this regard - it noted worrying features but it failed to trace their interactions vividly or to warn how severe were the emerging risks to bank soundness and, ultimately, to the living standards of the ordinary citizen.
However, the authors say external surveillance sources fared little better.
The IMF's major Financial System Stability Assessment of 2006 did not sound the alarm, and there is no evidence that its private warnings did so either.
The report says that bank governance and risk management were weak, in some cases disastrously so.
Credit risk controls failed to prevent severe concentrations in lending on property - notably on commercial property - as well as high exposures to individual borrowers and a serious overdependence on wholesale funding.
Internal procedures were overridden, sometimes systematically.
Mr Regling and Mr Watson found that the response of supervisors to the build-up of risks - despite a few praiseworthy initiatives that came late in the process - was not hands-on or pre-emptive.
Domestically, they say, there was a socio-political context in which it would have taken some courage to act more toughly in restraining bank credit.
They say the weakness of supervision in Ireland contrasts sharply with experience in those countries where supervisors faced with evident risks acted to stem the tide.
The international report finds that Ireland's banking exuberance indulged in few of the exotic constructs that caused problems elsewhere.
This was a 'plain vanilla' property bubble, they say, compounded by exceptional concentrations of lending for purposes related to property.
However, they say, these supervisory problems must be seen in conjunction with the absence of forceful warnings from the Central Bank on micro-financial risks.
The report says the true burden of responsibility emerges as quite broad, and it extends to insufficiently critical external surveillance institutions.
It also draws attention to Ireland's taxation system and says that tax expenditures here are three times higher than on average in the EU.
It says some tax concessions such as relief on property were granted on an 'ad-hoc' basis and in a way which was not 'fully transparent'.
