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This article examines Ireland's financial crisis. Thus far explanation has focused on individual or collective administrative failure: the office(r) of financial regulation singularly failed to scrutinise the banks sufficiently: it was a matter of poor risk management. While this article would agree that the (mis)management of risk was important to how the crisis unfolded, I argue that an explanation of why the crisis emerged demands an altogether different focus. Put simply, after financial regulatory reform, a reconfiguration of risk in politics took place as the locus of decision‐making about financial risk shifted from the realm of the political/legal (Cabinet/Central Bank/Department of Finance) to the economic/legal (retail banks, shareholders/consumers). It was a critical development, one that mirrored events taking place in the UK, upon which Ireland drew experience, for now assessments about risk undertaken by the banks demanded that intervention could be justified only on an ascertainable risk, not a theoretical uncertainty (or spurious fear). The evidentiary bar for intervention was therefore raised, removing the precautionary instinct implicit in the prudential governance of Central Banks.

A particularly prominent feature of contemporary politics appears to be an increasing concern with how risk, science and politics collide. To some, it reveals a political order that has become risk averse. This article challenges this view and argues that we need to appreciate the impact of the New Right on the reconfiguration of risk in politics. Influenced by a conservative view of individual responsibility and a liberal distaste for state regulation of the market, the New Right argues that risk is not to be feared, but embraced, that it should be viewed in a positive light; it stimulates both innovation and creativity. Here, the role of expert advice is to sustain the view that risks are an attendant feature of day-to-day life, that what matters is how, as individuals, we make judgements about those risks. Rather than perform the task of sustaining order through responsible government, science participates in (re)constituting order through the market. It articulates the extent to which individuals are exposed to risk, or defines more clearly where no risk can be proven. And if no risk can be proven, intervention cannot be warranted.