Housing crises, bank bailouts, high unemployment and lower incomes. These are all terms that we have become all too familiar with in Ireland during the economic crash of the last decade.

However did the media go too far? Have we been too hard on bankers? Did its negativity increase the size of the recession?

Andrew Palmer is the Business Affairs Editor with The Economist and he is the author of a new book entitled Smart Money: How High-Stakes Financial Innovation is Reshaping Our World for the Better - and he's been challenging the narrative which has been established since the 2008 crash, vilifying the financial sector.

Speaking to Down to Business, he said that the financial industry "is an industry and discipline that over the course of human civilisation has enabled us to do incredible things" - like supporting basic trading, the creation of insurance, and the lending of money to allow people to start businesses.

"Clearly there is bad behaviour in finance, it is absolutely true that money distorts behaviour. If you have people going into an industry who are motivated by money and there's lots of it  swishing around, then it's likely to have an impact [on their behaviour]," he explained, adding that it's too easy to assume that everyone in finance is motivated by greed.

He cites examples of new financial innovations like bank lending rates linked to property prices to avoid housing bubbles, new products to share risks in medial research to finance more companies' attempts to develop new medicines, and ideas like linking saving accounts to lottery draws to encourage people to save money.