elat ytilarom A - Village Magazine

April 2015 13

HE National Assets Manage-

ment Bureau (NAMA) has

written oﬀ €300m in debts for

23 major property developers,

we hear. It has been reported

from several quarters that representa-

tives for the Quinn family and the Irish

Bank Resolution Corporation (IBRC)

are currently negotiating a settlement

of their €4.5bn case against the former

Anglo Irish Bank and the Irish state.

According to the Sunday Business Post

(March 29th) the Quinn family could,

under the terms of the negotiations,

resume control of hundreds of millions

worth of property and other assets.

Bust developer Sean Dunne is cur-

rently involved in a $14m (€12.9m)

construction project in the US, a bank-

ruptcy oﬃcial has alleged. Dunne has

almost €700m in debts, but is still

living the lifestyle of a millionaire and

has allegedly been using companies

registered in his wife’s name to continue

developing property.

Meanwhile, ﬁgures from the Court

Service show that 7,000 repossession

cases are pending. These come from a

pool of 30,000 home mortgage default-

ers – not all in the Gorse Hill set – who

must wait for the banks to decide their

fate.

The owners of the banks, the citi-

zenry, either can’t get a loan or are

subject to new tighter rules if they do,

while those who ‘disappeared’ billions of

euros are being rewarded by write-oﬀs,

write downs and right eejits.

The humourless new rules will whip

the little people into line for losing the

run of themselves during the boom.

First-time buyers, the most innocent

party of all, will do whatever it takes to

scrape together the 10 per cent deposit

to qualify for a 90 per cent loan on a

property valued at €220,000 or less, a

tall order if you are living in Dublin. Fur-

thermore, the amount to be borrowed

cannot exceed 3.5 times their income;

impossible if you are one of the ‘work-

ing poor’.

It’s like ‘Brewster’s Millions’ – squan-

der one million to keep seven million,

except this time it’s not ﬁction, its fact

and its billions instead of millions. We

have reached book three of the tril-

ogy – The Return of the Developers. It’s

happening again in banks and oﬃces

all over Ireland; heroes are returning

to continue where they left oﬀ.

The hero has a particular life-cycle,

and Joseph Campbell, the 20th-century

American mythologist and scholar,

summarised this heroic sequence in a

famous book called ‘The Hero with a

Thousand Faces’. A ‘hero’ abandons his

routine or normal existence and enters

a world of uncertainty. He ﬁghts many

adversaries for survival and emerges

A morality tale, backwards. By Berni Dwan

elat ytilarom A

The Quinn

family could,

under the

terms of the

negotiations,

resume control

of hundreds of

millions worth

of property

and other

assets

“

NEWS NAMA

‘The Return of the

Developers’

– brought to you by

NAMA

14 April 2015

NEWS NAMA

victorious. Finally, he returns home

with new-found powers to bequeath

blessings on those he left behind.

Here’s a local adaptation of Campbell’s

heroic sequence. A property developer

or banker realises that his avaricious,

hedonistic and spendthrift behaviour

has got him into a bit of bother. He must

ﬂee the country and keep his head down

in some luxury foreign resort, pining for

home and avoiding the newspapers as he

swings his golf clubs and swills chilled

prosecco. While enduring the harsh life

of the exile his mates, and advisors,

keep him abreast of developments back

home.

When the time is right he will meta-

morphose from a poor emigrant to a

property developer again. Sure aren’t

most of his debts written oﬀ and aren’t

the people of Ireland crying out for him

to return and build much needed houses?

With asking prices rising by 2.2 per cent

nationally in the ﬁrst quarter of 2015,

it’s his duty to convert them from rent-

ers to home owners, to give something

back. It all comes to him in a dream. It

was thus with St Patrick.

Of course modern Irish mythology,

aided by seanchaí David McWilliams,

created its own heroic types. The bit-

part players were the house-buyers and

breakfast-roll addicts; the toadies were

the ﬁnancial institutions, some elected

representatives – and, many would say

– certain sections of the media; the aco-

lytes also came from sections of the

ﬁnancial, political and media world.

Their heroes were the builders, the

developers and their ﬁnanciers, whose

swagger was a foil to the cowardice and

ineptitude of those who should have

known better. Their disdain for the

humble PAYE workers equalled Coriola-

nus’ disdain for the Roman plebeians:

“What’s the matter, you dissentious

rogues,

That, rubbing the poor itch of your

opinion,

Make yourselves scabs?”.

The names of individual heroes are

already immortal and each reader will

have a favourite. The likes of David

Drumm, Sean Quinn, Sean Dunne, Sean

FitzPatrick (so many Seans) and Johnny

Ronan will be exam revision material for

a future generation. The waste-laying

Fianna Fáil-Green coalition government

will be neo-Cromwellians for our credu-

lous descendants.

Isn’t it just Panglossian to recollect

that the 22 builders of destiny, the

speculating wing of FF and FG, armed

with wrecking balls and cement mixers,

had borrowed €25.5bn between them?

€8.8 bn of this was used to buy develop-

ment land. This is what was uncovered

by the PwC report into Irish ﬁnancial

institutions commissioned by the Cen-

tral Bank after the bank guarantee in

2008. One can only imagine how close

to Hitler’s bunker that room in govern-

ment buildings was on bailout night in

2008.

Ireland’s government and central

bank acted as a money factory for these

touts. So called ‘oﬃcials’ were in the pid-

dling halfpenny place compared to these

peddlers of builders’ rubble.

Having lain low in abject luxury while

passing themselves oﬀ as ‘victims’ they

are now weaving themselves back into

the fabric of Irish society. Sean Quinn’s

return to his Cavan-Fermanagh border

principality in January is rivalled only

by Caesar’s return to Rome after con-

quering Gaul. This was made possible

after a local consortium paid €100m

to the Aventas Group, which took over

when Quinn Inc. went kaput, to buy back

a substantial slice of Quinn’s old empire.

All may soon be forgiven for all that oﬀ-

shore-y, Russian-y confusion, though

Judge Peter Kelly had meanly said that

in all his years dealing with “fraud and

chicanery” he had never seen anything

like the Quinns. But things are looking

up again for Team Quinn. That didn’t

take long, did it?

A much-celebrated player who looks

like he’d keep a dagger in his toga is

Johnny Ronan. Fresh from bankrupting

Treasury Holdings with debts of €2.7bn,

€1.7bn of which was owed to NAMA he

has ﬁnalised a deal with two multi-bil-

lion dollar funds, Colony Capital and

M&G to secure his leave-taking from

Nama.

Between them they will pay over

€250 million to buy out Ronan’s per-

sonal debts of over €290m. The Sunday

Independent cannot get enough of it.

Most ludicrous though, is the fact that

Ronan and fellow developer Paddy McK-

illen recently reﬁnanced debts on the

Treasury Building wherein resides the

headquarters of NAMA.

Ronan is also the largest shareholder

in Connaught House, which houses the

former Anglo Irish Bank. This is the

stuﬀ of Lewis Carroll’s ‘Looking Glass’.

More ludicrously again, in view of the

geopolitics, the deal is backed by Deut-

sche Bank.

It seems that you never pay for your

misdeeds in this story; you just sit back

and wait for the gods to smile on you

again.

Meanwhile the radical left, rather

than picketing the Treasury Building,

Avantas and Gorse Hill is diverted deal-

ing with a crisis generated by… water

charges.

In March 2014 a report by the Hous-

ing Agency revealed that 80,000

residential units will be required over

the next ﬁve years to meet the demand

for homes. It won’t be long before the

country is overrun again with whis-

tling bricklayers, bouncy castles and

the Château de Chasselas. With ne’er a

lesson learnt. •

Johnny Ronan,

fresh from

bankrupting

Treasury

Holdings

with debts of

€2.7bn, has

ﬁnalised a

deal with two

funds to buy

out Ronan’s

personal

debts

of over €290m

“

April 2015 15

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