No room for quiet men in today's brash corporate Ireland

NEWTON'S OPTIC:THE BANK's decision to place my Emerson Group shares in receivership is the greatest upset in my business career since that upsetting business with my shares in the bank.

I have spent the past year developing a proposal to restructure my assets by helping others to buy them before they are worthless. During this process I consulted and secured the support of some of the most respected individuals who would still speak to me.

“Here, fancy borrowing some shares to buy some shares to keep the share price up?” I asked in my down-to-earth Co Armagh manner.

I am utterly convinced we could try this again if the regulators cleared it on the quiet again, but it seems there is no room for quiet men in today’s brash corporate Ireland.

The Emerson Group businesses are among the best and most progressive in the world, no really, and I would like to thank our customers and staff for the fortune they made before I lost it all on a punt. There is no workforce anywhere that has the talent, commitment, loyalty and dumper trucks of the Emerson workforce. They proved it was possible to run an insurance company at a profit in Portadown, as long as it never paid out. The Golden Circle cement business continues to operate in exactly the way it has always done.

My mistake was to rely on the advice of experts instead of taking personal responsibility for my own decisions, so it’s their fault I didn’t take personal responsibility for my own decisions.

I was also over-reliant on the banks to buy shares in banks. You can try buying bank shares from an oil company instead but they just blow you off with some excuse like “we’re an oil company, we only have oil company shares”. So I ended up as trapped by the banks as everyone else, especially once everyone else had to pay my bank back.

Ireland needs enterprise and entrepreneurs more than ever at this time but mistakes in business should not result in a life sentence, not that there is the slightest suggestion of me actually facing a life sentence or anything even remotely like it.

By “life sentence” I mean wounded pride, embarrassment, that sort of thing. I’m the chairman of the rugby club for Christ’s sake. But otherwise I’m an ordinary and unassuming man and 90,000 people have signed a petition to say so. To all those people I would like to say “thank you”. Your instinctive deference to a man in my position is the rock on which this country has been built.

That brings me to the matter of gauche sentimentality. The Irish family unit is quite unique for support, loyalty and compassion. In other countries families might row if their life savings were wiped out by some reckless billionaire playing games with the banking system, for example. But as a patriot I am proud to say that sort of disloyalty would never happen here.

Understandably there has been extensive media coverage since last week relating to me and the Emerson Group. Amid all of the coverage there has been inaccurate and false reporting, and that of course is the very worst aspect of this whole sorry affair.