All bets are off

A mate txted me yesterday morning and told me to look up the Anglo Irish chat. The revelations certainly made for good “craic”, but apart from that so what? When I read an enquiry had been proposed as the official response, I tried to organise a bet that, apart from a 3 hour or so grilling by politicians in however many months time, both would get off Scot free. That was at 10.19. By 11.01 all bets were off.

I don’t bet, however, this seemed/ still seems a sure thing. Unfortunately, my mate shared my view that too many Orish politicians are implicated for anything even approaching justice to be served. Implicated in what you ask? Well, dat’d be the events leading up to then took place during the orish banking crisis. To be sure.

Like go here, here and here, fer instance, to read the chat and it actually leaves you feeling kinda dirty. Tax dodgers aside, the Orish economy reads like it was dominated by a charmed circle of politicians, bankers and businessmen/property developers who vigoursly backhanded the entire economy into the ground; did you hear O’Flaherty wants to develop dat dere land? Well, to get approval he’ll have to give the minister a helicopter ride to the races, bung his wife Eur50,000, do it as a joint venture with O'shaughnessy and make sure the bank executive is happy wit it’all. To be sure. And what did the regulator say? Daft Michael? Aww, we’ll just leave him out of it, besides you know how his head of section is pals with those senior banking fellas.

That was before things went tits up. Since then the entire economy has been unnecessarily put on the line by the government deciding to guarantee all bank deposits followed by a never ending run of bank bailouts, then the initial attempt to get taxpayers to overpay for bad bank assets via NAMA.

Anyone who seriously tried to bring any part of that to justice runs the risk of formally exposing the whole damn shebang. On the basis turkeys don’t vote for Christmas, the only thing I reckon any enquiry, give or take some recommendations about what not to do in future, will do will be to stall, delay and prevaricate until things have moved on.

So any takers for my bet (I’d gladly be wrong)?

P.S. Yes events in Ireland do put what happened here into sharp relief including the limitations of British journalism given its complete failure to place it in its proper context. As for the facetious /cack orishisms above, a system that bent doesn’t deserve respect.