Seán Quinn’s belief that he could hold the law in blatant contempt was perfectly rational
I LIKED to think I had the journalistic equivalent of gaydar. Having spent the best years of my life listening to powerful men spinning yarns, I imagined I’d developed a kind of lie-dar. But it let me down rather badly with Seán Quinn.
I watched the former multibillionaire on RTÉ’s Prime Time on June 3rd, 2010, when his empire was falling apart. His performance was not at all typical of the genre. His language was simple, apparently free of ambiguity, evasion and convolution.
Asked about the €3 billion he owes Irish taxpayers, he said: “We as a family don’t want to owe anybody anything. We want to pay the taxpayer back 100 per cent of his money . . . The five kids own the company; and myself, my wife and the five kids, all we want to do is make sure [that for] the taxpayer there’s no loss by the Quinn group or the Quinn family. We want to pay all our debts 100 per cent.”
Asked what was the security for the debt he was again impressively straightforward: “It’s secured on property throughout the world in nine countries and Quinn Direct.” He was saying three things without apparent equivocation: that indeed he owed the money to the Irish taxpayer; that he would pay back every cent of it; and that, in part, he would pay it from the sale of foreign property assets.
And I pretty much believed him. Stupid, of course: he now denies owing the bulk of the money, has done everything possible to avoid paying it back and went to every length, including bogus transactions and contempt of court, to put those foreign property assets beyond reach.
And yet, I still suspect that at that moment, in June 2010, Quinn wasn’t lying. For one thing, Quinn is not a fool and it would have been utterly foolish to give those commitments so plainly if he did not intend to keep them. Moreover, there is a reason to think Quinn may actually have felt at that moment that he should pay the money back.
He is not like most of the Irish mega-rich, who made their money from opportunism, political connections and cuteness. Quinn’s tragedy is that he is a throwback to the heroic age of 19th-century capitalism. He started with relatively little, made real things that people wanted (cement, glass, bricks) and sold them more cheaply than the opposition. He created thousands of real jobs, mostly in places that desperately needed them.
Heroic capitalists of this kind are individualists. Their individualism has unpleasant sides – egoism, obsession, a relentless need to accumulate. But its saving grace is a sense of personal responsibility. One side of “self-made” is “I made my own world”; the other side is “I take responsibility for what I’ve done”. There’s a basic pride, an old- fashioned manliness, in not owing anything to anyone – literally as well as figuratively.
So perhaps Seán Quinn really did recognise two years ago that his stupid gambling had left the Irish people with a breathtaking bill. And perhaps he did feel that his manly pride was invested in trying to pay back as much as he could. So why did this sense of honour melt away so quickly and completely? An old friend hoves into view: the allure of victimisation.
Inside every Irish master of the universe there is a whingeing little brat, his face awash with snot and tears, wailing “I didn’t do anything, it was Them. . .” When things go wrong the big, bold can-do entrepreneur almost invariably turns into a snivelling wimp, passing the blame on to Them: the banks, the media, the begrudgers, the crowd up in Dublin, the Brits or whichever of the many faces of Them happens to fit the moment.
The manly Seán Quinn turned into a pathetic little boy whining “They made me do it. They took my money.” But he had help. Quinn’s adoption of victimhood, and thus of moral innocence, was made much easier by two factors.
One was the outpouring of support from his own workers, who reflected back to him his self-image as a deeply-wronged hero. It is perfectly understandable that people initially wanted to support the man who created their jobs. But after it became clear that Quinn had acted just like an old Ascendancy landlord, putting their jobs, their families and their futures on the roulette wheel, they continued to play along with his martyr act.
The other great reinforcer of the victim mentality is, of course, the law. Quinn believed he could literally hold the law in contempt. And this belief was perfectly rational.
He belongs to a class that can cause immense harm to other people with almost complete impunity from criminal prosecution. One class of citizens knows if it ran a “blatant, dishonest and deceitful” operation to divert €4,550, the probability of prison would loom large. Another knows that doing the same thing in relation to €455 million is a matter for civil and civilised litigation. Until society categorises such people as criminals, they will continue to see themselves as innocent victims.