OPINION:The little people excoriated Bank of Ireland directors to their faces yesterday. This is one woman's feelings about our banks, and those who ran them – and us – into the ground
IN THE middle of the boom and blast (but “never to bust”) Celtic Tiger Ireland, I used to bring my old father up to the bank in Dundrum village, Dublin, for him to cash a fortnightly, very meagre and Dickensian, cheque of €85.
My father had become afraid of banks. He had ceased to understand them. He was born into an era and a time when banks were authoritative and dour, their officials spoke with ordered tongues, and banks were considered almost religious in that they were safe, secure and existed on defined paths.
It was different now. The bank was a selected universe; a privileged world of lilting tongues and silvered gods. The queue in Dundrum was always very long. Sometimes I stood with him as it meandered like a choked stream around the small high tables, strewn untidily with all the “fill out forms” and cheap nailed down pens.
At other times I would watch his failing, thin and frail form from a distance, leaving him to forge his own private and independent path. He leaned with huge tiredness on his stick waiting sometimes for over 45 minutes as he inched towards the glass panels.
There were never any seats for him. And there were never enough banking tellers to deal with customers. Many of the tellers were foreign. If a problem arose he would walk away penniless, not knowing what was being said or what to say. On those awful days we would start again at the back of the queue.
In all the hundreds of Thursdays when this ritual took place, no bank manager, under manager, trainee manager, lower, higher or middle executive ever looked or glanced his way. From behind their office desks or through internal blinded windows or sitting back observing the front of house on their swivel leather chairs, not one of them ever noticed him, acknowledged him, recognised him, smiled at him or stood beside him.
The murky moneyed might of the national directors, executives and chairmen also kept well away. They did not even live on the ground. Their existence was outside my father’s earthed vicinity. Theirs was an entitled residence up long, lush, carpeted stairs, in offices shaped by long mahogany oval tables, heavy brassed doors, cut glass drinks cabinets and bowls of lemons for effect.
Looking out on views of their speculator-created ugly skylines, they spoke of their nine irons on world class golf courses, the buzz of the descent on European ski slopes and the wonderful fish in over-napkined restaurants.
Men wearing loud ties, lacking ethics, lolling, guffawing and thrashing about, beyond and above, existing on financial roofs of the world. Untouched and untouchable. They knew nothing of the journey, the respectful endurance, or the honesty of the path of my father’s walking stick.
There is a very good reason for this. It is because the kind of power my father had, the power of the ancient, the experienced and of quiet fortitude: the power of hard times, rules, prayer, sacrifice, the poor box and a tangible presence, was not the kind of power the bank and all who underwrote it were interested in.
Their power was in something and around somewhere far more obscure and relevant. Where was it? It was on the ticker tape notices above my father’s head on the bank wall – the red dotted language declaring . . . 4.6 billion profit after tax . . . 4.6 million profit after tax . . . 4.6 billion profit after tax . . .
He had never noticed it. But I had.
He died in the hospice in 2007 when he became too tired to turn in the bed. He died with dignity and silence.
I am reminded of all those “person of no consequence” Thursdays more evidently, more comprehensively and indeed more emotionally now.
For me it is now a wilderness of Thursdays as we face the Irish Banking National Financial Swindle, the Irish Banking Reckless National Deceit, the Irish Banking Appearance-and-Reality Sham and the Irish Banking Collar-and-Tie Financial Disloyalty.
This is an Irish banking subversion that will visit all our homes, our work and our leisure. This is banking fraud that will affect families, family life, children and grandchildren. This is banking treason, the ghost of which will live in our walls and at our fireplaces for a generation.
I am not surprised. How could I be? I have first hand experience of how banks operate and who they prioritise. It is not you or me. It is not even our money. Their priority lies in how they can use and (we know now) misuse our money to create their private vaults of profit. A Victoria Falls of cascading monetary funds, a monetary waterfall, huge, deep and powerful – the trickles of which Mr and Mrs Queuer will rarely have access too.
It is interesting to reflect that without the money of the “persons of no consequence”, banks are useless and impotent. It is even more interesting to realise that with the money of the “person of no consequence” coupled with their own independent internal collaborations, connections, cartels, contacts, clubs and cabals, they become gods.
The banks – all of them – have been and are a disgrace. Anglo Irish Bank, Irish Life and Permanent, Irish Nationwide et al rank first on the top of that financial hooligan pile. We have yet to see whether the other main banks are this far behind in wild and careless financial irresponsibility.
Getting paid for playing around with our money on high roller roulette tables; getting paid for moving our money from one side of the road to another; getting paid for giving our money names and sending it on foreign holidays; getting paid for fabricating profit platforms; getting paid for utilising our money to dream up paths, routes, systems, funds and profits that exclude us from profit management; getting paid for remuneration schemes that favour only themselves and the wealthy; getting paid for incentives that encouraged greed; getting paid for including our money in buying fast cars and lining thick expense accounts; getting paid for no healthy ethical examination of accounts; getting paid for light touch – or in some cases no touch – regulation; getting paid for wasting our money; getting paid for losing our money; getting paid for squandering our money in the most irresponsible ways; getting paid to be moneyed medieval lords, residing in some kind of glass castle, looking out and down at the rest of us swimming in the moat, and getting paid for operating publicly in shadows, especially when it is done fraudulently, abusively and recklessly, without governance, without internal or external regulations and without profit limitations.
This must surely rank as the greatest, most revolting, offensive and immoral travesty. This is financial power perverted. To all dishonourable banking authority I say . . . “Stand not on the order of your going . . . But go at once.”
When my father was a young man he was asked to go to a house in Mayo to help collect the belongings of a brother and two sisters in their late 80s who had died within a few months of each other. While moss was growing through the cracks in the kitchen table and around the musty windows, he found thousands of green pound notes and orange 10 shilling notes in biscuit tins, tea caddies, buttermilk jugs, under mattresses, behind holy pictures and in the Sunday hats and missals.
“Imagine,” the neighbours mused, “not keeping their money in the new travelling bank.” The first of its kind in the district.
“Imagine,” I muse in 2009, the very idea of believing in banking safety and fair play.
During the Celtic Tiger, when I was asked “Who runs your country?” my reply was always quick. “Oh the banks do that. They run the country. Everybody else is either a boy, a monkey or a ‘person of no consequence’.”
“Why is that?” came the enquiry.
“Well,” I used to respond, “It is really very complex. We don’t understand it. The directors and the chairmen of the banks prefer it that way. You see, they are the experts. That is why they are in positions of such power. They are very well off. They own our money. They own all the views in the country. They own the system. They are all highly qualified. Some of them have been appointed by the Government. Others have been in the bank for ever. That is how they became directorial experts as to how things work. We depend on their expertise, their knowledge and their experience.”
My answer today is very different, for the day of the expert is over. The day of a private, all-knowing, corrosive financial and banking authority is also over. Some of us may not be too sure about this. Some of us may not even believe it. But I am very sure.
I am sure because my respect for and belief in the executives, directors, chairmen and boards of banks is over. My days of observing the modern forelock-touching caste system in any bank are over. My days of silently accepting unquestioned advice are over. My days of being unnoticed or unheard around banking power are over.
The days of not giving me parallel value, reward, return and incentive for my money, no matter how small, are over. And the days of regarding me as a “person of no consequence” lacking worth, significance, merit and respect, standing with the ghost of my old father unheeded in the queue, are definitely gone forever.
For me, there is at last an honourable, challenging breeze under the door.
Marie-Louise O’Donnell is a former radio producer and presenter. She lectures in the school of communications at Dublin City University