Stop pussyfooting around scoundrel bankers and punish them
■ “It blowed away, it blowed away; All the crops that I’ve planted blowed away; You can’t grow any grain if you ain’t got any rain; All except the mortgage blowed away.” Pete Seeger wrote the above, Bruce Springsteen gave it meaning. He called it ‘My Oklahoma Home’.
Ophelia came and went. For two days, Ireland hid within its anger. Ministers we never see gave us the full-feathered peacock strut. Then Ophelia blew out up near Iceland... but the same old, same old didn’t go with it. Seeger sang about Dust Bowl America of the 1930s. Banks repossessing homes, etc.
Yesterday, the headlines were about the banks’ refusal and scandal regarding tracker mortgages here (Irish Independent, October 19).
So let’s stop pussyfooting around. The banks are engaged in appalling behaviour. Leo Varadkar is calling them in for a finger-wagging. Don’t. Hit them with legislation and immediate cutting back of cash. Cannot be done? Really!
Go back to November 2008. Bust and negligent banks appeared on the late Brian Lenihan’s door step pleading for a bail-out. They were given one with extraordinary conditions. Both AIB and the Bank of Ireland will pay nothing to the State for the next 20 years. Written off over losses. A joke. So if legislation that brought austerity, penury, pain, emigration, low wages and curtailed services was brought in to save those banks within hours of Mr Lenihan and Brian Cowen’s meeting with the bankers, the same timeframe can be done today for the beleaguered mortgage holders.
The question is who runs Ireland? An elected government or big business? The latter appears the most logical. The tracker scandal is fraud, it’s theft. Time to send in the Garda and Revenue and start what Iceland did 10 years ago. Jail the corrupt. They broke a nation.
John Cuffe
Dunboyne, Co Meath