Did You Hear The One About The Disgraced Irish Bank Chief?

The old jokes have been refined:

Q: How do you save a bank senior executive from drowning?
A: Take your foot off his head.

Q: When you see a bank chairman coming towards you with half his head blown off, what do you do?
A: Reload.

I mean, seriously, when it comes to a toss-up between the likes of the head of Anglo Irish Bank Sean FitzPatrick, any of the other heads of banks and their close cousins the corrupt politicians, would you buy a used car from any of them?

Would you even bother to spit on them if they were burning to death?

I know I wouldn't. The ones that have been caught so far have lived with their loathsome snouts in the trough for years now and we're the dopes who are paying the penance for it.

Glass of champagne in hand, superior smirk on their socialite faces, they have consistently and as a matter of course looked down on the ordinary person.

They have stolen from us and many of the smaller shareholders have been financially ruined because of what they have done.

Along with them and our witless government they have ruined the economy.

And don't give me any of that old get-out-of-jail-card-free claptrap about it being world-wide.

I'm living HERE and they are two of the groups responsible for the down turn.

Pensioners who were counting on their investment to ease their latter years now find themselves bewildered and confused at seeing the money that they had given in good faith being suddenly taken from them.

Mister FitzPatrick is only one of many but for simplicity's sake let's stick with him for the moment.

He grew from being an accountant to managing the small Anglo Irish in 1985 and then onto heading that same bank, which was by now worth 13 billion euros.

Amazingly, 80 per cent of his loans went to his cronies, the major property developers who at that time ran this corrupt little nation.

How many of these upstanding Captains of Industry benefited from that eighty per cent?

Twenty of them.

Bloody twenty! Think about that for a minute. Roll those figures around your head.

His enormous property portfolio ultimately included five star hotels (but of course), medical software firms and an oil well in Nigeria. An oil well, for crying out loud!

And that is to name only a very, very small amount of what he and another executive of the bank - Lar Bradshaw - had shares in or owned, some of them admittedly highly imaginative.

All of which allowed him, along with his cigar-smoking, top-of-the-range car driving, Kristal-sipping buddies to swan around Dublin and the world.

Ah, lads! You and I don't know how to live at all, at all!

But wait! There was something rotten going on under the civilized façade of Anglo Irish Bank.

You see, it turns out that old Seany-Boy's bank and foreign properties and Las Vegas Irish bar and all the rest of them were built on a foundation of sand.

The shareholders didn't know, of course. Why would they?

They were only the saps who were financing the luxury that these boyos enjoyed.

But FitzPatrick had borrowed 84 million euros from the lender and used it to buy shares in Anglo Irish.

In fact altogether he got 129 million euros. Give the man his due though: he did disclose 7 million of that to his hapless shareholders.

He then managed to scrape up 45 million to at least pay off some of what he owed. Is your head spinning with incredulity yet?

Well, between the jigs and the reels he ended up owing the aforementioned 84 million which was, as in some modern- day Grimm's fairy tale, never seen again.

How did he get away with it, I hear you ask?

Simple. Every time an audit was about to be done he just up and transferred (as you do) his millions - well, technically his banks' money but don't confuse the issue - into another bank, Irish Nationwide.

He was helped in this by the aptly named Michael "Fingers" Fingleton, another God to the bankers of Ireland. Genius, really.

Mind you, it says a lot for the auditors that this went on for YEARS without them saying "Hey, guys, wait a minute. Look at this..."

This happy and heart- warming tale of simple Irish millionaires who only wanted their time in the sun and never mind that it involved risking the money of ordinary shareholders, had to come to end. And for a few at least, it has.

As the famous Celtic Tiger lay gasping its last breath and its cubs began to run for cover and FitzPatrick and his developer friends, who now owed the bank 70 billion watched in horror as their properties plummeted into oblivion, the game was up.

Which is why the astonishing decision was taken last week by our leaders Brian Cowan and Brian Lenihan, on behalf of the Fianna Failures, to nationalise the bank.

Ah, well. I guess the taxpayer, who sees more of his jobs go now on a daily basis, gets to be "patriotic" once again on behalf of the super-rich.

This is the kind of shady skullduggery that the Celtic Tiger was whelped on. Screw the small guy and bail out the Players.

Hell, at the very moment that the government was trying to think of a way to bail out the banks - all the banks - Sean FitzPatrick was shamelessly buying up 290,000 more shares and making a cool 12 million out of it.

You know, I always refer to that great scene in Roman Polanski's sublime piece of cinema "Chinatown", where Jack Nicholson's private detective asks the venal creature played by John Huston when enough is enough. "How many houses can you live in?" he wonders. "How many lobster dinners can you eat?"

Well, I wonder about the families behind the men ( and it is mainly men) who want more and more and more.

They accumulate more than they could ever spend in centuries and still want more. IS it just the power trip? Do the wives really not think about? Or do they not care? Or perhaps they just think that their husband or whatever is a financial genius.

That's the posture the late crook Charles J. Haughey took until he was caught and then suddenly he was just a simple man who had put his trust in a dead man.

Handy that. Dead advisors can't be questioned, you see.

What do the children of these jokers think?

Some of them must have learned to ask tough questions and learn to think for themselves at the fancy fee-paying schools that their daddy sent them to.

Or do these alpha males rule the roost at home in the manner that they rule in the boardroom?

(Stupid of me, that crack about private schools. Princes of the Realm Charles and Harry went to the very best of schools and one of them wanders around talking to plants and referring to his black servant as "Sooty" while the other laughs and declaims that he may have ginger hair but at least he's not Irish.)

Ah, but FitzPatrick and the rest of them are going to jail, I hear you say.

Sorry, friends. You're confusing America with the banana republic that I live in.

This isn't an Enron happy ending where thieves and liars go to jail.

Indeed, in some cases for life, there to repent their greedy ways and to find God. Over here - wait for it - what FitzPatrick did was technically LEGAL.

Forget about the small shareholder who has lost all of his money and is now ruined. Nobody will be going to jail.

And you wonder why they hold us in total contempt.

As Bob Dylan put it: "All the criminals in their coats and their ties/Are free to sip Martinis and watch the sun rise."

Look on the bright side, though. I'm on holiday at the moment but hope to see you next week: Same bat-time! Same bat-channel!

You can reach Charley at chasbrady7@eircom.net