The good, the bad and the greedy of the Irish pension scandal

In this column last week I was discussing the way some people at the top of Irish business and official life have been trying to ignore the harsh cutbacks in pay and services that everyone else here has to take on board.

Cutbacks are for the little people, the members of the Greedy Bunch seem to think, like Leona Helmsley used to say years ago about taxes before she was locked up.

The Irish Greedy Bunch think they are too important and too busy to be bothered with cutbacks themselves. They're above all that.

Their job is to tell the rest of us how much we need to tighten our belts, and how the country will go bankrupt if we don't. The idea that maybe they should share the burden, or lead by example, never occurs to them.

I was saying here last week that this selfish behavior by some of those at the top in Irish life was generating a scary level of anger among ordinary people across the country. It was destroying social cohesion, the sense that we're in this mess together and must work together to get out of it. If it did not stop, there would be open rebellion and marches on the streets, I warned.

Oh my prophetic soul. There haven't been any protests yet, but the outcry over the past week has been so great that the Greedy Bunch is starting to wake up to reality.

One of the worst examples of greed at the top was the ***1.5 million pension top-up being given this year to the chief executive of the Bank of Ireland, who earns half a million a year. This was necessary so that he could, as agreed, retire at 55 on a pension for life of over a quarter of a million a year.

This bank, like the rest of the Irish banks, has been rescued by the Irish taxpayers, most of who earn a fraction of that salary and have little or no pension. So the outcry when this became public was deafening.

One of the labor leaders said that the case was making the national agreement on pay reductions impossible. That agreement is already in trouble with several unions saying no, which has the government very worried.

So last week, at the 11th hour, the bank boss bowed to pressure and said he would not take the pension top-up. Nobody in the government admitted to calling him, but I'd say the lines were burning up last week and he caved in.

But by then the media and the public had scented blood. Suddenly everyone was asking why the elite at the top of Irish society was still being paid so much.

How come the bankers who had got the country into the mess were still getting huge salaries? How come the politicians and the senior civil servants who had been asleep while the country went down the tubes were still being paid very high salaries, or were retiring on huge pensions for life?

Over the past week, the hunt has been on. And nobody in the elite is safe from scrutiny.

Suddenly everyone's pay is being looked at, particularly those who were part of the property boom, or the politicians and the regulators who failed to stop the boom turning into a disastrous bubble.

There is public outrage at the amount of money that the guys who ran the two financial institutions who were most out of control still seem to have. The two guys are Sean Fitzpatrick, who ran the relatively small Anglo Irish Bank, and Michael Fingleton, who ran Irish Nationwide, a small savings and loans.

Between them, these two started the madness that was copied by the other banks. They are the main culprits who blew up the property bubble and floated it away on a sea of borrowed money. They are now costing the Irish taxpayers billions.

Yet Fitzpatrick still lives in a luxury home and has a luxury lifestyle. Since the crisis blew up he seems to be spending a lot of his time playing golf in Spain.

Fingleton grabbed a million euro bonus in his last year in office, on top of a huge salary, before he retired on a pension pot of well over ****20 million.

Fingleton turned what used to be a small savings and loans for ordinary people buying homes into a major speculator in the commercial property market, borrowing billions to do it. Almost all that money has now gone, and the Irish taxpayer is left with the consequences. Yet Fingleton is still living like a millionaire, presumably because he has millions stashed away, apart from his vast pension.

And the financial regulator who was supposed to be overseeing all this? The guy who should have been reining in Anglo Irish and telling Fitzpatrick that he was borrowing far too much for the size of his bank and lending to too few people in just one sector (property)?

The guy who should have been telling Fingleton that a small savings and loans like Irish Nationwide had no business getting in so deep in commercial property? Where is the financial regulator now?

Well, he's retired as well, on a yearly pension that is four of five times what I get in pay even though I'm still working.

So being asleep on the job has paid off very nicely for him. How come? Because like a lot of these guys he was a state employee, so his pension is guaranteed, thanks to the taxpayer.

All of these guys at the top, both the incompetent state employees like the last financial regulator and the top executives in the private sector banks, had salaries in telephone numbers and pensions either paid by the taxpayer or backed by huge personal pension funds, paid for by their banks.

Since all these banks are bust, surely their pension arrangements no longer apply?
Wrong! The taxpayer -- through the government bailout of the banks -- looks after all that.

And it's not just guys who are at it. The gals are just as bad.
This week's big controversy is about Ireland's current European commissioner, a former member of the Dail (Parliament) and former minister called Maire Geoghegan Quinn. She used to be a primary (junior) schoolteacher before she got her father's seat in the Dail (like so many others).

She's the European commissioner who looks after science and innovation and things like that, for which she has no qualifications whatsoever, but that's another story.

What we're interested in here is the money she's getting, a cool ****350,000 a year as well as lavish perks for accommodation, travel and so on that come with being a commissioner (the commissioners are like ministers in the European Union's cabinet).

Geoghegan Quinn’s salary as commissioner is ****243,000 and is paid by Europe, but she also has two Irish pensions (one for being a former member of the Dail and one for being a former minister) which add up to ***108,000. And she is being paid these pensions by the Irish taxpayer even though she is working full time as a commissioner.

The daft system we have in Ireland entitles former ministers to start getting their pensions even when they remain as ordinary deputies in the Dail and therefore are not really retired. The same goes with Geoghegan Quinn; she's retired from the Dail but gets her ministerial and Dail pensions even though she has a full time job as EU commissioner.

Up to a few days ago she was refusing to answer media questions about this. But so great was the public anger that on Monday she suddenly caved in. She has decided not to continue taking her Irish pensions while she is being paid by Europe, she said.

A number of other former ministers and junior ministers also responded to the public outrage by announcing on Monday that they would no longer be taking their pensions while they are still on Dail deputy salaries.
Given the problem the country faces, this is the least they can do. Funding all these pensions for former ministers, most of whom are still earning salaries, costs the Irish taxpayer tens of millions.

But changes are on the way. The government reduced the ministerial pensions for sitting members of the Dail by 25% last year, and after the next general election a sitting deputy will not be allowed to also pick up a ministerial pension.

But for legal reasons that change cannot be backdated. Among the current deputies picking up the pensions in addition to their Dail salaries are former Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Bertie Ahern, who gets ***98,901, and former Labor leader Ruairi Quinn, who gets ***41,656. Ruairi is giving up his; Bertie is thinking about his.

The politicians should be leading by example, of course, which is why this situation with ministerial pensions is such a scandal. But there is a similar problem in the so-called state sector, the civil service and all the semi-state organizations where pay and pensions are funded by the taxpayer.

People retire early, get golden handshakes and big pensions, and then head off and get jobs in the private sector and continue to get their big pensions even though they are not retired at all.

And in the banks and financial institutions that have been bailed out by the taxpayer, huge pay-offs and pensions are still happening. Even the last financial regulator got a retirement deal to die for!

Why does this happen? Because the Irish taxpayers are mugs who have always put up with it.

But not anymore. Now everything is under the public microscope, and the country is in revolt over what it is finding crawling around there. The Greedy Bunch is on the run.

Ireland's economy is also lost in the volcanic dust

It's a bit like being in an episode of Lost, except that we're not killing each other. Not yet anyway.

But since that vast cloud of volcanic dust from Iceland moved over us last week and grounded the planes, we're certainly cut off from most of the rest of the world. It's a reminder of something we easily forget -- we're an island nation, stuck out on the edge of Europe. Without air transport, it can feel pretty lonely out here.

Not needing to travel at the moment, it doesn't bother me. In fact I rather like it, for purely selfish reasons.

I live on the coast on the northside of Dublin close to the flight path of the planes coming in to land at the airport. Suddenly, with no planes in the sky, I am rediscovering what total silence is like. Especially in the early morning, when the noise of planes arriving and departing Dublin Airport is usually an endless background rumble.

The total silence, apart from the bird song, is wonderful, a bit like going back to childhood days before Ireland got so busy.

But for people who need to travel, it's anything but wonderful. In fact it's a total nightmare.

We still have the ferries -- if you can get a ticket -- to take us to Britain and the north of France. But they're fully booked, slow, and the trains at the other end are packed. So without being able to fly, it has felt rather cut off here over the past four of five days.

No doubt the volcanoes in Iceland will calm down in time and stop filling the skies with volcanic ash, although there are fears that the eruptions could leave us lost under the dust clouds all this week, and possibly longer.

But we're lost in other ways as well, ways that are just as serious and that are our fault rather than the fault of nature. Over the past week, we have seen growing signs that we have lost our way as a nation, beaten down by the enormous economic problems we face.

Sticking together is something that the Irish used to be good at. When the going got tough, helping each other and sharing the pain was what Irish people did.

There was a sense of unity, a generosity of spirit, an eagerness to share the load that seemed to be uniquely Irish. It was something you could always rely on, wherever you were and whatever the circumstances.

Social cohesion is what the academics call it. It's a vital quality for any country in difficult times.

And sadly we seem to have lost it. Somehow we mislaid it somewhere during the selfishness of the boom years and we never got it back.

In its place, we now have an attitude of every man for himself, of grabbing all you can and hanging on to it even if it means everyone else will have less. The economic crisis we face has brought out the worst in us.

And that less attractive side of us was on view here last week in several ways.

First there was the rejection by the unions who represent most state workers of the deal that had been worked out between the government and the union leaders a few weeks back at a marathon conference at Croke Park.

That meeting had been held to try to avoid further stoppages and go slows by workers in the public services, the most visible effect of which had been the long delays in getting a passport recently.

The public sector workers -- teachers, nurses, police, civil service, etc. -- are unhappy because over the past year their pay has been cut by between 10-14% (although part of that is a levy to help pay for their pensions). From the government's point of view, the cuts were essential to stop the country going bankrupt, because pay for state workers is such a large part of total state spending here.

Relative to our size, we have a lot of state workers. We are currently borrowing around ****500 million a week for day to day state spending and that cannot continue.

The Croke Park deal guaranteed the state worker unions that there will be no further pay cuts for the next four years, no forced redundancies and no change in guaranteed pensions.

There is not a private sector worker in the country (those of us who are not paid by the state) who has that kind of security. A lot of us already have taken much deeper pay cuts than the state workers.

We don't know how bad it's going to get, whether our jobs will be here next month or next year, whether we will have to take more pay cuts to keep our company going.

We have to accept all that because we don't have a choice.

If my company does not make a profit, I'm out of a job. And at the end, very few of us have generous guaranteed pensions like state sector workers. In fact the pensions that most of us have are down the toilet with the stock market.

Given all that, the unwillingness of the state sector workers to accept any pay cuts has caused huge anger among the rest of the workforce here. The go-slows and stoppages that have been disrupting state services were designed to get back the money already taken from state workers.

They didn't get that, but the Croke Park deal did give them a guarantee of no further pay cuts over the next few years. That was an extraordinary undertaking by the government, since we have to cut a few billion more out of the budget each year over the next three years. And it's even more extraordinary that so many state worker unions are now rejecting the deal.

The unions point out that many state workers are not highly paid, earning ****30,000 to ****40,000 a year. It's not a lot, or at least it did not seem like a lot during the boom years.

But it's ***600 to ***800 a week, and that's a lot more than the ****200 which is the basic amount of welfare that the private sector workers who have lost their jobs -- close to half a million of them -- get to live on.

Yet state workers are rejecting the deal and threatening further disruption. They point to the billions being pumped into our banks. How is that possible if they have to take pay cuts, they ask.

But that's a non-argument. We have to rescue the banks. And state workers should have to take pay cuts in line with private sector workers.

Instead of doing that they are using their muscle (unlike the private sector the state sector is still heavily unionized) to protect themselves. And tough on everyone else, as far as they are concerned.

The argument for sharing the pain of the cuts is not helped by the revelations that the banks are still paying their senior managers salaries that read like telephone numbers, in spite of the ceiling put on executive pay in the banks by the government as part of the rescue.

The ceiling is half a million euro a year, which should be enough for anyone. But a few days ago we learned that the top executive in the Bank of Ireland, one of the banks eating up billions in rescue money courtesy of the taxpayer, had ****1.5 million added to his pension pot recently.

When this news broke, there were no apologies from the bank. It was part of his contract, they said.

His contract allows him to retire at 55 on a pension of a few hundred thousand a year, and to fund that they have to stick in an extra ***1.5 million into his pension pot at this stage.

See? Nothing wrong, they said. Just fulfilling contractual obligations.

That's the kind of thing that is driving people here crazy. We effectively own the banks, so how can this happen?

Since the banking crisis hit, about half a dozen of the top management in the main banks have "retired," and we had to watch them (the geniuses who bankrupted the country with their reckless property lending) walk away with golden handshakes and huge pensions.

There was such an outcry when this happened a year or more back that we thought it was over. But not so, it seems.

The culture of huge salaries and limos still persists at the top levels in Ireland. As a result the perception is growing that we are now a two tier state.

There's the top tier, which as well as the bankers includes all the bankrupt developers who still live in their mansions and drive their big cars, even though the state has had to take over their billions in toxic loans.

It also includes lawyers and other professionals, many of them paid by the state, who won't drop their fees. There are all these people in the top tier.

And then there's the rest of us, in the lower tier. We're the mushrooms (they keep us in the dark and throw horse s*** at us!)

All of this is doing huge damage to our society. To our sense of what is fair. To our willingness to accept the cutbacks that must be made in the next few years to balance the budget and get us back on track.

The sense of community, of supporting each other, of caring and sharing, is being eroded. We're lost.

And volcanic dust is the least of our worries.

Ireland of the welcomes . . . and the racism

One story was big enough last week to push our economic crisis off the front pages for a day, and that was the racist murder of a 15-year-old Nigerian boy stabbed to death in Tyrrelstown, a housing estate on the west side of Dublin, the sprawling area of cheap new housing where many immigrants have settled. 


Toyosi Shittabey was one of six children and had been living in Ireland for the past 11 years, since he was four years old. He was a popular youngster and was a gifted footballer, playing for the under-15 side at Shelbourne Rovers, one of the top soccer clubs in the country. His aim was to play for Ireland one day, and he was good enough for that not to be just a pipe dream.


The killing was deeply shocking, not least because Toyosi was so well known in the area and so well liked in his local school. His funeral saw a huge turnout of people from the area and the school, with many of his schoolmates openly upset and crying.

Last weekend there was a memorial meeting in the city center to protest at what had clearly been a racist murder. 
The horrified reaction here was palpable, not just in the area but across the city, because this killing seemed to confirm the fears that many people have about the consequences of the high level of immigration we have had over the past decade and a half.

There has been a tendency at official level to sweep such fears under the carpet, to insist that there is no problem. But the reality on the ground is rather different. 


This wishful thinking at official level was visible again after Toyosi's murder. Immediately after it happened local and national politicians and church and social leaders appeared in the area to get across the message that although this was "an attack with racist overtones,” there really is little or no racism in Ireland. This attack was unusual, an aberration, they insisted. 


That is the official position. It is, as I said, largely wishful thinking, and it's pushed by the very same people who denied for so long that Ireland had a problem with immigration which needed to be fixed.

Back then, of course, with the economy booming, it didn't seem to matter too much that so many "asylum seekers" who were really economic migrants were arriving here. Typically, they had no papers, claimed to have come from somewhere their life was in danger and said they needed asylum.

And back then there was always the "Irish baby" route to becoming permanent here if their asylum claims were rejected. 
At its height, over 10,000 immigrants a year -- not counting those from other European Union countries -- were coming here, mostly from poor former Soviet and African countries. Very few of them were ever sent back.

Given our terror of appearing to be politically incorrect, the reaction was to set up numerous state funded bodies to help them and to give them free legal aid to guide them through the system. Many applications took years to process, by which time the immigrants were settled here and/or had an Irish child. 


As I said, it did not seem to matter at the time and we were all encouraged to embrace "the new multicultural Ireland" as a positive development. Anyone who expressed any doubts about what was happening was immediately accused of racism (often by the same lawyers who were doing so well out of the system). 


Looking back now, it seems ridiculous, a form of national hubris. Here we were, a tiny country on the edge of Europe which had always been so hopeless at providing jobs for our own people that they ended up emigrating all over the world, supposedly being able to give jobs to thousands of people from thousands of miles away. And many of those thousands who came here had neither English nor job skills. 


Well, now the boom is over, the bubble has burst and we are left with a serious problem. Our collapse into recession and soaring unemployment has brought the tensions that were hidden by the boom to the surface. And denial, wishful thinking or political correctness are not going to solve the problem for us. 


One of the difficulties, of course, is that despite all we were promised about programs to spread immigrants across the city and country, most of them ended up living in poorer housing areas on the west and north sides of Dublin. These already deprived areas with drug and alcohol problems and high unemployment now have large numbers of immigrants competing with the locals for the limited social services that are available. 


The small Mount Eustace estate in Tyrrelstown in West Dublin where Toyosi lived is better than most of these areas, but over 50% of the 200-plus homes in the estate are occupied by immigrants, many of African origin.

Like in the wider Tyrrelstown and Blanchardstown areas, in West Dublin, many of these homes are owned by small time Irish property investors who bought a few houses during the boom and now get the rent for their immigrant tenants in direct payments from the state. 


Inevitably there are tensions with some local people who resent the influx of foreigners and the fact that they get unemployment payments, rent support payments, welfare payments based on the number of children and so on, just like a local Irish family. Unemployment among these immigrants is very high, another source of resentment. 


Something else that is happening now is that many of the immigrants who arrived here 10 or 15 years ago now have children who are teenagers. What happened to Toyosi is an extreme example of the problems that this is bringing. 


Exactly what was involved is still under investigation, but one newspaper here, The Sunday Tribune, reported the event as follows:

Toyosi had been to the sports center in nearby Blanchardstown with his friends on Friday evening. Afterwards, he was walking home with his friends in the Mount Eustace estate. He was with four other male teenagers, two originally from Nigeria and two originally from the Congo, and with them were two Irish teenage girls.

They passed two men outside a house in Mount Eustace and the teenage girls asked one of the men for a cigarette. Both men then began to abuse Toyosi and his friends and called them "niggers" several times, according to a local source. A brief altercation ensued before Toyosi and his friends walked away. 


According to the Tribune, the two men (who are brothers) then went into their house and got a knife. Both men had been drinking, according to a Garda (police) source. They got into their car and drove after the teenagers. 


When the men approached the teenagers again, Toyosi told his friends not to get involved and to keep walking. But the man armed with the knife stabbed him through the heart, the Tribune reported.

How anyone can say this was not a racist attack seems incredible. Yet some politicians immediately claimed that this was “not specifically a racist attack.”

But of course to admit that we have a serious racism problem here now would be to admit that our immigration policy and system over the past 20 years was a bit of a joke.

It would also mean admitting that all the money and structures that were supposed to be put in place to ensure that our immigrants would blend in and prosper here was all just talk. We did spend the money, a few hundred million a year in total, but a lot of it went to lawyers and landlords.

What we were told would never happen is exactly what has become a reality. We have ghettos in some city center streets and around the outer suburbs, usually in the poorest neighborhoods, where there is a high concentration of immigrants and a lot of resentment from the locals there. All it takes is someone to say the wrong thing, or even look the wrong way, and it can end up in serious trouble.

We have created a complex problem for ourselves, just one aspect of which is the schools in these areas. A few months back the principals of some of these schools warned a committee of the Dail (Irish Parliament) of the dangers of failing to address the educational needs of children with non-Irish parents.

The five principals (all with around 90% immigrant kids in their schools) told the committee that it was essential for these children to learn to speak English as soon as possible to help them integrate. The principal of one school in West Dublin explained that 87% of pupils at his school did not have English as a first language. He called for additional funding for language teaching for both children and their parents.

His school is not unusual -- there are half a dozen schools around Dublin with similar levels of immigrant kids, many of whom have no English at all. In some of these schools the kids speak a few dozen languages.

And it's not just Dublin. The principal of the school in Claddagh, Co Galway (and you can't get more Irish than that) said that he had high levels of immigrant children and that “ghettoization” was already happening on the east side of Galway. He noted the experience of rioting in France because immigrants had not been properly integrated into society.

The problem is, of course, that there is no money now to pay for additional language and support teachers in these schools where teachers are at their wits end trying to cope. We didn't spend the money during the boom. Where are we going to find it now?

Meanwhile, attitudes are hardening here as the recession gets worse. And it's worst among the young Irish who have to compete with immigrants for whatever jobs are available, especially low skill jobs in poorer areas.

A recent national opinion poll showed that 43% of people would like to see some, but not all, immigrants leave the state. But 81% of those aged 18 to 24 would like to see the number of immigrants fall.

The Irish are not more racist than anyone else. But we are rapidly learning that we can be just as racist as anyone else when we are put to the test.

Staring into the black hole of financial debt in Ireland

Financial Armageddon ... economic holocaust ... Celtic Chernobyl ... journalists and commentators here struggled last week to find words to adequately express the scale of what has happened to us.

Normally, language like this would be way over the top. But this time, extreme though the language was, it seemed too weak to encompass the extent of the monumental disaster that has engulfed us.

The doomsday phrases were prompted by the awful truth about the Irish economy which was revealed last week. On Tuesday of last week, the Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan revealed for the first time to the Dail (Parliament) the true scale of what it is going to cost to rescue our banks.

I wrote about it here last week, listing the tens of billions that have to be provided, but like most people the gigantic scale of what was involved did not really sink in with me immediately. Somehow it did not seem real.

It took a few days. But now I get it. Now myself and everyone else here really understands the financial catastrophe that has befallen Ireland, and the implications for all of us in the coming years.

It's easy to get lost in the billions, although it helps if you remember that every billion euro so casually mentioned by the minister last week is actually one thousand million euro.

But numbers aside, what was happening to us last week was very simple -- Ireland was being mortgaged. Last Tuesday, March 30, 2010, was the day a huge millstone was hung around our necks. It was the most significant day in Irish economic history since we got out independence nearly a century ago.

So what happened last Tuesday? To save the Irish banks the Irish government (and therefore the Irish taxpayer) is taking on an enormous burden of debt that will take decades to repay.

We are talking about at least €90 billion -- with the strong possibility that this could increase to well over €100 billion -- a debt so enormous for a country this size that it will beggar us for years.

The scale of what is involved is almost beyond comprehension. The sums are so big that not just our present but our future is being mortgaged. We are being saddled with a gigantic mountain of debt.

What this means in practical terms is that we will all be paying more tax for years to come, and instead of that money going to improve state services it will go to pay the interest on the huge debt we have now taken on.

The money that should be spent on improving our hospitals and schools and welfare and the police and public transport and the roads and all the other state services so desperately in need of extra funds will be used instead to pay for rescuing our banks. It's all going to be swallowed up by debt interest and debt repayments.

From the heady heights of the Celtic Tiger just a few years ago, we have plunged into an economic black hole that will take us decades to climb out of. And it's all down to the appalling mistakes made by the golden circle of bankers, developers, incompetent regulators and politicians who got us into this mess.

The main bankers and developers who caused this crisis through their reckless gambling in the property bubble can't pay for their losses now, because most of them are bust. So the ordinary taxpayers -- who had nothing to do with what went on -- have to underwrite the bill. And the level of anger among ordinary people here now is frightening.

People here now realize that our economy is screwed and that their future and the future of their children has been blown away. They are seething with rage.

How did this happen? Why are the people who did this to us not in jail like Bernie Madoff?

People here want answers, and they want the people who caused this mess punished without any further delay. The anger on phone-in radio shows is frightening, and it's not just the rage against the bankers and developers and politicians that is so worrying.

The way people here are talking now, our sense of community, of being proud to be Irish and being optimistic about the future and our ability to be successful have all been eaten away by this crisis.

The way people here are talking now, it's grab all you can of the diminishing pile. It's everyone for himself, it's get out if you can, it's encourage your kids to emigrate, it's a cynicism about fairness and political accountability here that is so deep that our future as a just and caring society has been shattered.

What happened last Tuesday was that Lenihan spelled out to the Dail exactly how bad things are, and began the process which will result in us taking on €100 billion or more in debt obligations.

That colossal sum is the result of two things - the transfer of the bad property loans from the banks into state ownership under the National Asset Management Agency, and the recapitalization of the banks and savings and loans institutions that are now bust.

There are two main culprits in what has happened to us, Anglo Irish Bank and the Irish Nationwide Building Society. Both of these went absolutely crazy during the boom, lending billions of euros to developers with little or no security.

Anglo in particular was out of control, a small bank that grew at an astonishing rate from a loan book of a few billion to around €80 billion during the boom years. While the boom continued, Anglo could show high profits, so much that the biggest bank in Ireland, Allied Irish Banks, began to chase them to protect its share price.

Pretty soon it too was throwing the rule book out the window and loaning vast amounts of borrowed money to Irish developers for projects not just in Ireland but around the world, from China to the U.S.

Irish Nationwide, a building society or savings and loans, was smaller but almost as bad. Instead of just taking deposits from ordinary savers and giving loans to people who wanted to buy houses which is what a building society is supposed to do, it borrowed huge sums on money markets and got into commercial property lending and speculation.

The madness that Anglo and Irish Nationwide got involved in was not stopped by the Irish financial authorities, now a very sore point with people here. And although Anglo and Irish Nationwide were the worst, the madness infected all the financial institutions here.

Some went less crazy than others, but they're all bust now and have to be rescued, the government says, also a very sore point with people here.

Why not just let the worst banks go bust, particularly Anglo and Irish Nationwide? We can't do that, the government says, because that would mean burning the bond holders (the international money market people who lent the money to the banks) and that would destroy our international reputation.

The biggest bond holders are senior bond holders, the government says, like big investment funds and pension funds, and they have to be paid.

It's hard to swallow but the government is right about that. If we don't pay them we will never be able to get funds in the future (and don't forget Ireland is running a big budget deficit).

But there are also the unprotected subordinated bond holders, the guys who took a bigger risk for higher interest payments, and it's hard to see why the government is insisting on paying them in full as well. They took the risk and now they should pay the price, maybe getting back a fraction of their investment.

But the government is insisting all the bond holders have to be paid in full. The guys who gambled billions must get it all back. Why?

Lenihan’s argument is becoming less convincing by the day, as we learn more about the black hole we are in. There are a lot of couples here who bought a house during the boom for, say, a €350,000 mortgage, the house is now worth less than €200,000, maybe one of them has lost his or her job, they are battling to save their house, pay the utility bills, they can't afford a holiday, some weeks they can't put petrol in the car.

It's that bad for a lot of people here now. So when they read about banks being rescued and bondholders being paid in full and all this being done by piling a huge burden of debt on the back of every person in Ireland, you can understand why people here are so angry and disillusioned.