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Prosecutions more important than another inquiry.   by Frank Connolly.   Expect much false confidence in advance of the promised Oireachtas inquiry into the failings of the banking system leading up to the disastrous guarantee of September 2008. Public expenditure and reform minister, Brendan Howlin, promised that the inquiry will provide “answers to fundamentally important questions” when the legislation for it came into effect in late September. The inquiry will have terms of reference that are “narrow and specific” and will deal with events leading to the guarantee five years ago, the role of banks and their auditors and the role of State institutions. We can expect that the politicians who convened into the early hours on 29th/30th September 2008 along with the officials from the various government departments, the Central Bank and regulators office, will be called to give evidence and that the hearings will be televised to maximise the impact on a citizenry desperately searching for the facts surrounding the decisions made in those crucial days that have wreaked such havoc in their lives. Observers who can’t even remember what the Honohan, Regling and Watson, and Wright Commission reports found, won’t be holding their breath. In any event the wings of any forensic inquiry are being clipped – even if one could be adequately carried out by small number of Oireachtas members with little or no banking or finance experience. Firstly, it excludes any examination of Anglo Irish Bank, the sharp and reckless practices of which contributed greatly to the collapse, due to forthcoming criminal trials of three of their executives (in which Seán Quinn and his family are expected to appear as witnesses for the prosecution.) Secondly, it will undoubtedly be hampered by the memory lapses and tantrums which in turn inspire legal advice which shifts the players and the audience every now and then to the Four Courts as we witnessed so often with the Dublin Castle tribunals. And there is the overwhelming influence of the main banks which brought the mess upon us in the first place when they claimed to have liquidity problems at a time when they were hopelessly insolvent and exposing the Irish people to a €400 debt mountain. It is evident from their (mainly) arrogant demeanour at the Oireachtas Finance committee a few weeks ago that senior bank executives have no intention of changing their fundamental purpose in life – which is to make as much profit as possible for their shareholders and for themselves in the process. The biggest, and third, reason for scepticism, however, lies in the repeated failures of the authorities to deal with banking excess following scandals exposed in the 1980s (AIB-ICI/Irish Permanent), in the 1990s (DIRT/Ansbacher/AIB-Rusnak) and in the 2000/2010s (AIB-Faldor/Moriarty/Flood/ Mahon) when the practices that brought the country to its knees were so often exposed and then allowed to continue. Only eighteen months ago, the Mahon report recorded how in the early 1990s AIB officials would collect wads of cash from Bertie Ahern at his St Luke’s office for deposit in the O’Connell Street branch and that the then finance minister would change tens of thousands in foreign currency in the same branch, without question. It reported that another AIB official helped Frank Dunlop open a secret Rathfarnham account through which hundreds of thousands flowed in corrupt political payments. Senior executives of the bank were accused of withholding information from its client, Tom Gilmartin, and in effect colluding with the illicit payments to councillors which were then reimbursed from Gilmartin’s personal account despite his ignorance of them. (The IPBS and Irish Nationwide did not emerge from the inquiry garlanded in roses either.) In the aftermath of Mahon AIB chief executive , David Duffy, promised that the misbehaviour identified in the damning report would never be repeated in the bank. Yet nothing has been done to take action against those responsible for such misbehaviour. Seeing politicians such as former Taoiseach Brian Cowen and his attorney general, civil servants David Doyle, Dermot McCarthy and Kevin Cardiff and former bankers Dermot Gleeson, Eugene Sheehy (ex-AIB), Brian Goggin, and Richie Burrows (ex-Bank of Ireland) on any sort of a public stand will provide some gratification, unless the protagonists acquit themselves better than envisaged, but it may achieve little. Only criminal prosecutions of central players who acted outside of the law to enrich themselves and others at the expense of the Irish people, based on evidence gathered through the forensic efforts of the Garda, accountants, lawyers and financial experts can satisfy the public appetite for justice. The roles of the DPP, the Central Bank and private prosecutors in such prosecutions need to attract much of the journalistic interest that is being diverted to the sideshow in inquiryland.

“The alternative to State bailouts was a takeover by private equity groups, which were hovering over the carcasses of the Irish banks. If the private equity groups were allowed inside the door, the board, staff and culture of the banks would have been filleted. Suddenly re-capitalisation looked a lot more attractive”. Shane Ross – ‘The Bankers’ Ronan Lynch Writers trying to get to the bottom of our banjaxed system in recent years have pitched up pithy titles such as ‘The Builders’, ‘The Bankers’ and ‘The Untouchables’, but it’s unlikely that we’ll see any books soon with NAMA in the title. Nama (The National Asset Management Agency) is complex, secretive, unloved and fairly maligned, meant for footnotes rather than headlines. Yet, looking through a list of properties owned by just a handful of the top developers taken in by Nama, it seems that few of us will have escaped engagement with the agency. There’s hardly a major shopping centre in the country, for example, that hasn’t passed through the agency’s books in the last four years. Billions of euros spent writing off property loans have had an insidious effect on Irish society, causing hardship particularly for the young and vulnerable. Not only have the developers largely escaped any hardship but many retain the lavish lifestyles to which they had grown accustomed. Billionaires have been reduced to multi-millionaire status. That’s rich by any reckoning.   Read the full story in the Dec/Jan issue of Village, in shops now.  

Thankfully, Éamonn McCann is one of the few significant political figures from the late 1960s still active. He fought his first election in February 1969, as Northern Ireland Labour Party candidate for the Stormont Parliament, and his most recent two years ago as the People Before Profit Alliance’s candidate in Foyle (Derry City) for the Northern Ireland Assembly. This was the fifth time he had stood for Foyle, and he came close to taking the last seat. Over the years, he has lived, campaigned and worked as a journalist on both sides of the border and is reflective on both. In general, he is cheered by changed social attitudes, particularly in the Republic, but sees the left as having lost significant ground in politics. In the North, he sees a left-wing party as more needed than ever. However, he admits the task is difficult. Having worked as a journalist for over 40 years he bemoans media that question ever less. He views the social changes in the Republic as particularly positive. “Women couldn’t work in the civil service if they were married”, he notes. “Or serve on juries until the early nineteen seventies”. What strikes him most is that “some of the things that were contentious in the past have just ceased to be issues”. When he first became an activist: “even very prominent gay people in Ireland were afraid to declare themselves. In the nineteen-sixties, I’m not sure that there was anybody in the South who was openly gay, not anybody who was prominent or well-known. Look at now, where you have the captain of the Cork hurling team. Compare that to the soccer situation in Britain, or here indeed, where not a single gay soccer player has come out”. [Apart from Justin Fashanu.] Politically, however, the 1960s were more optimistic. He became a member of the Northern Ireland Labour Party. “For a time, the Northern Ireland Labour Party was a viable political organisation”, McCann says. “It had a number of very able campaigners. Some of them would have appeared to me to be quite right-wing, but nevertheless there was Charlie [later Sir Charles] Brett on housing, and there was a good number of solid people there. It was a party taken seriously at that time”. While controlled by the right-wing, there was a sizeable socialist left. The political landscape was different through to the early 1980s. “I can remember that there was a very lively rank and file life within the Labour Party in the sixties, and indeed in the seventies, where there was a lot of passionate and indeed robust discussion going on”, he recalls. “I remember being at a Labour Party conference in Cork, and it was at a time when there was an election for the Dáil imminent, and I can remember noting that this was clearly an anti-Coalition conference. The leadership was denounced by TDs and it wasn’t considered the most ridiculous thing in the world – people were allowed to have very different views”. He has seen changes, too, in the media. “The decline in print media has gone parallel with a change in ideological surroundings”, he said. “The media, my experience of it, was much less predictable back say in the nineteen seventies. It could be much more awkward than it is today”. He could tell a news editor that a piece was far longer than requested, and it would be printed, in full. Now, pages are laid out in advance and journalists have to write to a template. When he began, RTÉ was the only broadcasting institution in the Republic. “But it also meant that RTÉ could be rather expansive in the way it did things”. he says. “It could put on programmes on both radio and television that were not simply calculated to attract a large audience”. An example was Donncha Ó Dúlaing’s ‘Highways and Bye-Ways’. “He used to just go about talking to people around the country,” McCann says. “A quaint old programme in many, many ways, but very interesting”. Newspapers are losing their appetite for investigative work. “Very rarely now do you have a situation where a couple of journalists on a newspaper will be put on to a story and allowed to dig away and then report back”, he said. “And sometimes a newspaper might have to invest that sort of resources in a story on the understanding that no story might ever appear”. The nature of journalism has changed, being office-bound. “I used to be news editor of the Sunday World”, he tells me. “We used to come in on a Tuesday. We had eight or nine reporters, but you would never see all of them in the newsroom together, there was always somebody out and about, somebody down the country, maybe somebody across in London, digging up at something and so forth”. Since those days, the national media pay less attention to the North. He remembers over a dozen journalists working in Belfast for Dublin-based media. The Irish Times reported on debates in the old Stormont parliament. “Difficulties in the peace process and violent incidents are looked on as news”, he said. “If it doesn’t have to do with Orange-Green relations, it’s not news at all. That’s a very limited and narrow view on what’s going on in the North. And it’s become the default view of the media in Dublin”. “When it comes to both economic and social matters, I know that any Northern journalist who goes to the South is frequently struck by, well, the sheer ignorance of Dublin journalists about the North. During the last couple of years there’s been the big controversy on the law about abortion. It seemed to come as a surprise to not just one or two but most Dublin journalists that abortion was just as illegal in the North as it was in the South”. McCann is still an active campaigner in Northern politics. He sees prospects for the left as simultaneously never better, and never