Feckers (26 page)

And the madness had been facilitated and enabled by those whose job it was to ensure that the banking sector was adequately regulated and monitored. In September 2008, less than a fortnight before the government announced that it would guarantee all debts and deposits in Irish banks, the then Financial Regulator, Mr Patrick Neary, had declared that Irish banks were ‘resilient and well capitalized’.

Nobody could understand why we couldn’t just close down Anglo. It was not as though we could not manage without a bank that was costing us several years’ worth of GDP to keep the doors open. But the Taoiseach and his Minister for Finance patiently explained that it was because of the bond-holders and our international creditworthiness. Nobody would lend us any more money unless we paid off what we had already borrowed. Still, nobody could understand. What? – we needed to go broke in order to stop ourselves going broke?

Sean FitzPatrick was now a national pariah. Every day, the newspapers carried stories about his
€
100,000-a-year membership of a golf club in Marbella and his cars and his pension plans and the fact that, as a former director of Aer Lingus, he still got free flights. The people of Ireland became madder and madder until it seemed they would burst. A newspaper carried a front-page picture one day of Seanie and another famous Irish banker, Michael ‘Fingers’ Fingleton, boss of Irish Nationwide, with the headline, ‘They Should be Shot’. A radio show invited people to text in their responses and almost everyone agreed. The editor went on television and said that, of course, it wasn’t meant literally, that it was, of course, a popular colloquialism used to express strong emotions.

Seanie made a plausible scapegoat. His raffish good looks and expensive mode of dress made him easy to hate. When he was brought in for questioning to Bray Garda station, he emerged, after the maximum statutory period allowed for questioning, wearing a smart blazer, shirt and tie. Even in ignominy, he seemed to have lost none of the arrogance that had made him the most beloved of bankers in the Tiger years. No longer plain ‘Sean’, he became ‘Seanie’, the mock-palsy inflection of that ‘e’-sound managing to summon up an immeasurable amount of cultural rage and contempt.

But Seanie had been, in many respects, the epitome of the Celtic Tiger breed. He had pursued, perhaps slightly harder than others, the ethic that had driven the Irish economy from success to triumphalism, simply translating the mindset of the Tiger years into a fit-for-purpose banking model. In 2007, the year before it collapsed, Anglo Irish Bank, with shares peaking at
€
17.31, was held up as a model for other banks to follow. FitzPatrick was amenable to business people in search of start-up capital – oblivious, it seemed, that this would one day read as ‘reckless lending’. Minimal regulation sang a two-part harmony with a degree of faith in the future that, had the whole thing not been a house of cards, would have made Seanie a candidate for canonization.

It became fashionable, after the collapse of the Celtic Tiger, for people to begin their remarks about the catastrophe by emphasizing that they did not go in for ‘this “we” business’. By this they meant that they did not accept, for themselves or those for whom they purported to speak, any portion of the blame for the madness that had gripped the country for most of the aptly named Noughties. Of course, most Irish people did not get rich in those years, and many had as much of a struggle as they’d ever had. But there was, none the less, a collective element to the madness that, in retrospect, few seemed willing to own up to. In those years, the Irish people, generally speaking, began to feel that the hand of history, which had hitherto offered them the hind tit in everything, had suddenly changed its attitude. After 800 years of poverty and abuse, they were being offered an opportunity to have a decent life and a comfortable old age. Not alone did nothing or nobody suggest that this perception was fundamentally wrong, but any residual doubts or caution were scoffed away by ‘experts’ speaking daily on the media platforms from which the same experts would later pronounce on the crimes of the bankers, developers and politicians. Money was now ‘cheap’, they assured us, cheaper than it had ever been before. In fact, it was so cheap that someone who had borrowed lots of it was far better off than someone who had borrowed nothing. The same newspapers that would later condemn Seanie, Fingers et al. were daily running graphs showing how much property had gone up since last month/last week/yesterday. The most modest householder was encouraged to think of himself as a shrewd speculator, whose house was ‘earning’ multiples of whatever he himself was bringing home. It therefore followed – did it not? – that said householder could treat his income as pin money, to be thrown around without a second thought? In fact, why not take out a credit card so as not to be hidebound by anything as tedious as earned income?

This is what happened, whether we like to admit it or not. Not everyone was equally ‘guilty’. Perhaps nobody, in truth, was as ‘guilty’ as Seanie Fitz. But Seanie’s sins were not purely his own. They were the sins of a culture out of control.

In a culture gone clean out of its mind, there was always going to be someone slightly, or even considerably, more barefaced than everyone else. The Anglo figures were spectacular, but, had this particular atrocity not happened, everyone would have been just as outraged by what, thanks to Seanie, seemed the more modest craziness of AIB or Bank of Ireland.

There was always going to be a villain, and Seanie, to give him his due, made for a good one – well turned out and unrepentant to the end.

47
George Lee

I
n early May 2009, when George Lee announced that he was leaving RTE to run for Fine Gael, the idea began to take root in the Irish consciousness that George could become the answer to all our problems. This being just four months after the inauguration of Barack Obama as President of the United States, the notion of finding a fresh young hero was something to get carried away by. The fact that George wasn’t black was just the beginning of the problem.

George was already a national icon from his frequent reports on the state of the economy on radio and television. These were always clear and factual, and frequently offered devastating indictments of the government’s stewardship of the national fortunes. George was the bespectacled boy who had a dream about the emperor’s Finance Minister with no backside in his trousers, and shouted it out on the six o’clock news. This made George a good economics reporter, but not necessarily a good national saviour.

Having George join its ranks might have been enough to suggest that Fine Gael was the answer to all our problems, which, for all the awfulness of the incumbent government, would have been stretching things. But by then, the Irish people were so desperate for answers they would have pulled the arm off anyone who seemed to know anything and was prepared to talk intelligently about it.

Apart from his undoubted capability as an economic analyst, there was something endearing about George. He had fire in his belly. He appeared to be sincere in his belief that the Cowen administration was the worst in the history of the State. His declaration that he wanted to be able to tell his children that when his country was in trouble he ‘got involved and tried to fix things’ resonated with many of his fellow citizens, despite the growing cynicism of the times.

In newspaper articles shortly after he announced that he would be a candidate for Fine Gael in an upcoming by-election in Dublin South, George outlined his manifesto for saving Ireland. He attacked the government for its record, just as he had when he was Economics Editor of RTE, but did not seem to realize that, as a politician, he would need to go further than criticism. George said that unemployment had doubled in the previous year and predicted that it might approach 600,000 by the end of 2009. But he offered no plan to create jobs. He said the government had offered no hope, but he did not have any hopeful thoughts of his own. With an election to fight and a half-page in a national newspaper to play with, you might have expected George to come right out and say what he proposed to do differently. But he didn’t. He just said we needed an energetic new government, ‘capable of fresh thinking’ and ‘strong enough to drive change’. But what kind of fresh thinking seemed unclear and he didn’t seem to be thinking many fresh thoughts.

George criticized a recent emergency Budget, with its savage tax hikes, cuts in welfare and mortgage relief and its promise of a property tax. ‘This is not acceptable,’ George emphatically declared. But he did not say what he
would
accept. People might have been forgiven for thinking that, if George had a realistic alternative to all this misery, he should not go on keeping it to himself, but should spit it out so we could all get back to the party.

Then, briefly, it seemed that George might be about to suggest something concrete. While the rest of the world was engaged in expanding public investment and cutting taxes, the government was doing the opposite and was therefore making things worse, he explained. This was taking billions of euros out of the economy at the wrong time, and would ensure the downturn lasted much longer than anything we had seen until then. It would stifle hope, discourage enterprise and could ‘easily turn a recession into a depression’.

You didn’t need to have been the Economics Editor of RTE to know this. For nearly a year, the dogs in the street had been barking about Brian Lenihan going around like a demented DIY enthusiast, sawing in turn at each of the legs of the bockety table in an effort to stop it wobbling. And the cats on the other side of the street had been gleefully screeching back that soon the table would have no legs at all.

So George, once in power, would – what? – cancel the levies and restore the Christmas bonus? George didn’t say. He merely went on to remind everyone that he had been the boy who said that the emperor had no clothes. He had ‘spoken directly and impartially’ to people as clearly as he could. As danger loomed, he had ‘consistently highlighted the risks of inaction and complacency’. But his warnings were ignored. Actually, no, George decided, the government had chosen to portray his impartial and clear messages as ‘an effort to talk down the economy’. It sounded as if George wanted to get them all back for being mean about him.

George seemed clear in his mind that we needed to get the country ‘back on track’ and that this could not be done with the present lot in power. That is why he wanted to offer ‘in a small way’ the change and the leadership the country needed.

But, when you rummaged through the wrapping in search of George’s solutions, all that seemed to be there was George’s intense belief in his own abilities and insights.

He said that, if we wanted to put things to rights, the best thing was for him to become part of the Fine Gael team and get elected as a TD for Dublin South. It was clear to him that Fine Gael under Enda Kenny was the party best placed to provide the kind of leadership and vision the country needed.

George won the by-election to much fanfare. The people of Ireland smiled for the first time in many months, and then went back to work and waited for the revolution.

Nothing happened, and this nothingness was followed by more of the same. Eight months later, George emerged, virtually in tears, from a broom cupboard he had been given in a building on Kildare Street. Nobody would listen to him, he said. Nobody cared what he thought about anything. He was in total disagreement with Fine Gael party policy and nobody gave a toss. Everyone was still being mean to him. George ran screaming out into Kildare Street, saying he was jacking it all in and returning to his job in RTE.

George Lee’s experience tells us many things about the deep malaise at the heart of Irish politics. It illustrates the madness that arises from the absence of true idealism in the Irish body politic that a man known only for being paid to criticize economic policy can come to be seen as a national redeemer. But it also highlights the cynicism of politicians who think they can use such a figure to give the impression of vision where none exists, and also perhaps the vulnerability of journalists to the power of their own delusions. It took about a year for the complete George Lee drama to unfold. The only thing that changed, in the end, was that George had a free space for life in the Leinster House car park.

48
Brian Cowen

I
n May 2008, when Brian Cowen replaced Bertie Ahern as Taoiseach, the national mood was one of increasingly fragile denial. Within months, media commentators would come to describe the new Taoiseach as a disaster, the worst ever. But, for now, the talk was all about his unparalleled intelligence, his history of toughness on the football field, the fact that he could hold a pint or ten and sing a song in the snug of any public house in which the gauntlet was thrown down.

Deeper down, the implication of such commentary was that we were still on the hog’s back. What we needed was another affable actor to maintain the mood of the previous decade. To suggest otherwise might have been to acknowledge what was already known in the bones of the culture: that we were in deep trouble.

Cowen, as Minister for Finance over several years, and as a key member of the team that had been running the country since 1997, was unquestionably centrally responsible for the situation faced by the Irish economy in 2008, and in particular for the failure to anticipate the meltdown of the banking sector, which all but bankrupted Ireland back to the nineteenth century.

In good times, Brian Cowen had seemed an effective number two, but there was scant evidence that he had either the charisma or the vision for the top job. His much-vaunted intelligence had yet to be demonstrated in any significant context beyond the party rooms, but had become an off-the-peg cliché to be lobbed into articles about the new Taoiseach by journalists who would later turn on Cowen with a vengeance rarely encountered in Irish political commentary.

Despite the carnival atmosphere that greeted his election as Taoiseach, Cowen had no moral mandate and was never required to justify his claims as titular leader of the Irish people. Indeed, such was the sense of his entitlement within Fianna Fáil that he was never even called upon to set out his stall as would-be leader of his own party. This would reveal itself as the most debilitating factor of his leadership as it progressed. Had he subjected himself to a contest in that summer of 2008, he might have acquired a stronger sense of entitlement to the position of Taoiseach. Instead, he acquiesced in his inheritance of the Fianna Fáil leadership on the basis that he was an able party animal, a good number two to Bertie and, above all, because it was his turn.