The banks have drained us dry and now they are coming back for more

WE ALL know people who are lovely, decent, kind and respectful – until they get drink in them. I’m reminded of a man I knew who was an intelligent, cultured person until his blood/ alcohol level was tampered with; he then became cantankerous, argumentative and downright insulting.

There wasn’t a pub for miles around that didn’t at some stage bar him.

The man wasn’t a regular drinker but went on the occasional bender that inevitably resulted in his being cast out into the night from at least one licensed establishment.

On these benders he would always attract a hanger-on, who would stay with him until the money, along with the goodwill of the local publicans, ran out.

At a certain point in the day’s drinking he would suggest to his travelling companion that they visit a pub that had barred him at some stage. “We’ll see if they remember me,” he would say. And of course they would, as soon as he became troublesome.

The banks remind me of this character; they have drained us dry and sucked the marrow from our bones and still they come back for more, hoping we won’t remember or recognise them. And they are right; we have bailed them out five times in the last decade.

In 2009 after their profligate inflation of the Celtic Tiger we bailed them out to the tune of about €40bn, an amount so big that we cannot begin to conceive of it. But conceive of it we must because it was our money and it is gone, paid over by our political masters — bailout number one.

Not happy with that lump sum, they came back for more, to be taken surreptitiously and in instalments. Figures produced by the Central Bank earlier this year show that the average Irish mortgage holder pays €2,500 per annum more than their EU counterparts.

According to the same figures our banks apply interest rates that are almost double those applied in other Eurozone countries. New mortgages in Ireland between 2017 and 2018 commanded on average a 3.21pc interest compared to 1.8pc in the rest of the Eurozone — bailout number two.

For fear we might take our business away from the current cabal of bankers the Government continues to hobble any potential competitors.

The German Kassebank, in total frustration has given up trying to bring its highly successful model of local banking into the Irish market. Local alternatives are dying the death of a thousand cuts; the Credit Unions are being smothered by bureaucracy, while An Post is being weakened by the day.

Despite the right-wing, free-market credentials of all our recent governments, they continue to intervene in the banking market to keep competition out — bailout number three.

As an aside, if only they would take a leaf out of their attitude to the banking market and go against their neo-liberal instincts when it comes to the housing market. Our successive governments, all of the free-market variety, have failed miserably when it comes to housing. The FF/PD coalition refused to intervene in the housing market when it was bubbling towards explosion in the early to mid noughties.

Meanwhile, the FG-led coalition propped up by FF now refuses to intervene even when families are sleeping in Garda stations for want of a safe place to lay their heads.

Returning to the banking debacle, in the latest twist the government has allowed vulture funds to snap up the bad debts of the banks for bargain basement prices. So instead of forcing them to confront the consequences of their poor lending decisions and do deals with their struggling customers, the government has allowed them to divest themselves of their responsibilities and throw these citizens to the wolves — bailout number four.

The IFA has pledged that it will fight attempts by the vulture funds to force the sale of farms where the farmers have sought to engage with the lenders. Sources close to the

OUR POLITICIANS CONTINUE TO COLLUDE IN THE FATTENING OF THESE BANKS AT THE EXPENSE OF ORDINARY PEOPLE

banks have been muttering to auctioneers, and anyone who will listen, that if the struggle against forced sales continues they may be even slower in lending money for the wider farm sector; our bankers are a classy lot.

The cheek of them is beyond belief. Having sold their distressed farm loans to faceless vulture funds with ever-changing names, they now intend to penalise the rest of the farming community for not co-operating.

The next twist adds insult to injury. These banks have been allowed to write off against tax the losses they incurred in the banking collapse (the same losses paid for by the taxpayer in the original 2009 bailout) and as a consequence they will have minimal tax liabilities for the next 20 years — bailout number five.

They keep practising their dark arts hoping that we will not remember them, that we will forget how we bailed them out, how we saw our young and not so young forced take to the four corners of the world to make a living after these banks had turned our country into a basket case.

They hope we won’t remember how they persisted in screwing their customers defrauding over 20,000 tracker mortgage holders and in the process destroying lives, families and businesses.

Meanwhile, our politicians continue to collude in the fattening of these banks — at the expense of ordinary people — to the point where they are the now the most profitable in Europe and ready to be sold off.

And when they are ‘disposed of ’, the profits — our money, paid for in sweat, tears, exile, homelessness and hollowed-out services — will disappear into the pockets of pension funds in Britain, Europe and the USA

And they hope we won’t remember, and maybe we won’t.

We are a quiet people.