46 Seanie FitzPatrick

Reviewing the damage done in hard currency, and perceiving the disaster in terms of its final playing out, it would be possible, without attracting much in the way of criticism or dissent, to fill any list of fifty feckers who fecked up Ireland with the names of fifty bankers.

In the case of Seanie FitzPatrick, former Chairman of Anglo Irish Bank, the amounts of folding stuff involved are so gargantuan as to make it a plausible proposition that Seanie was single-handedly responsible for the collapse of the Irish economy and the pauperizing of at least two generations of Irish people.

To make it worse, if such were possible, it emerged that Seanie had for years been doctoring the accounts at Anglo Irish Bank to make it appear that the bank was more solvent than it was. Sleights of hand were used to ‘flatter’ the balance sheets, with major customers being encouraged to make short-term lodgements coming up to the end of the financial year. These ‘bed and breakfast’ arrangements gave the impression of a healthy rate of deposits, which kept the regulators and credit agencies happy.

It gradually emerged that this practice of ‘balance sheet management’ was widespread in the Irish banking sector. Seanie, of course, not being a man to do things by halves, had taken the device to the level of high art. He had himself borrowed some €85 million from his own bank, of which €68 million had been written off by the obliging management. Other directors had borrowed a total of €56 million, of which some €40 million had been written off.

It’s known as the ‘Celtic Chernobyl’. The figures, no matter how you cut them, were beyond belief. The banking crisis would cost every family in Ireland something like €2,000 a year for far longer than anyone could foresee, the equivalent of €50,000 added to every mortgage in the land. All Irish banks were disaster areas, but Anglo Irish was the worst, accounting for debts of €40 billion and rising by the day. It was as if nothing that had happened in Ireland for the previous fifteen years – or indeed for the seventy-five years or so before that – had had any purpose or merit at all. Everything had come not just to nothing, but to a lot less than nothing.

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.