Ireland was just like Anglo ...a bust bank
KEVIN Cardiff has compared Ireland to Anglo Irish Bank on the eve of our €65billion Troika bailout, saying we shared all the characteristics of a bust bank at the time.
The former Finance Department secretary general was back before the Banking Inquiry yesterday where attention was on the disastrous days leading up to our entry into the programme in 2010.
Mr Cardiff told the inquiry that secret work was under way in the Department preparing for the prospect of Ireland being possibly ‘unceremoniously’ kicked out of the euro by the ECB.
He added that it was in no way a foregone conclusion that we would get the money from the Troika in 2010 and he said to reveal their secret work to ensure contingency funding at that stage would’ve been ‘ridiculous’.
The country was in a dire state in October 2010, two years after the blanket bank guarantee had been issued, Mr Cardiff told the inquiry. ‘Philosophically, legally, we were on the edge,’ he said.
‘Not everyone wanted to give us the money, there were certainly naysayers in the IMF, and some contrarian voices in the ECB too – so it was by no means a foregone conclusion that we would get the money,’ he said.
Mr Cardiff was asked if he blamed the ECB for us having to enter the bailout – that led to the recent years of austerity – because of the pressure it put on the Government.
He explained that he understood the negotiating position Jean-Claude Trichet and his officials were coming from.
‘This was a negotiation,’ Mr
Cardiff stated firmly. ‘Think of us as Anglo, because we’d all the characteristics of a bust bank, and the ECB were a bit like us in relation to Anglo,’ he said.
‘They were doing their jobs in tough negotiations.’
In the months leading up to the bailout, Mr Cardiff revealed, there was secret work under way in Finance because of the real fear that we could have been ejected from the euro. However, he said this could not be admitted publicly and so he kept quiet about it at a Public Accounts Committee hearing at the time.