Of course all countries are run by a series of boys’ gangs, which have graduated to being called cabals
THIS country only has one problem: that it is too small, and that we love to keep it as small as possible.
“You’d normally be hesitant to choose somebody you’d never heard of,” he says of the process of appointing new directors. Choosing the wrong person means “risking the cohesiveness of the board”, he adds. That was Laurence Crowley, a former governor of the Bank of Ireland, in an interview with this newspaper last Friday.
And certainly this cautious, conservative, risk-averse advice was followed by Bertie Ahern. When he was appointing directors to his electoral machine in Drumcondra, he stuck very close to home. So close to home in fact that of the three trustees of Ahern’s spiritual headquarters, St Luke’s, two are not even members of the former taoiseach’s party.
Because Ahern’s home lay not with Fianna Fáil, about whom he is going to be refreshingly rude in Ursula Halligan’s three-part documentary series, which starts on TV3 tonight, but with the lads. Your money is new but your friends are old. Emotionally that makes sense. After all, it has been the motto in this country for the past 15 years.
Mr Crowley’s money is not new – his family has been in accounting since the foundation of the State, although come to think of it that’s not so very long ago either – but he sticks with the same method as Ahern. According to Una McCaffrey’s article: “The think tank Tasc found that between 2005 and 2007, Crowley was one of the 11 directors in the country’s top 40 private companies and State-owned bodies who had 10 or more links – via multiple directorships – to other companies in the network.” These guys never meet anyone new.
Not, at least, where it matters, which is at work.
The exorbitantly expensive golf outings held for American clients and Irish developers by Anglo-Irish Bank came as no surprise. The details – including the free gifts – appeared in the first extract from Simon Carswell’s book on Anglo, which appeared in this newspaper on Saturday. Hold on to those €7,000 cufflinks, lads.
Of course we already knew that Ireland is run by a series of four-balls, the membership of which can be changed only by death or a public admission of homosexuality.
Seán FitzPatrick (or Seanie as his mates admiringly called him, the diminutive making him appear closer, and yet smaller. It’s all a bit like Father Ted’s famous lecture on perspective) famously said that, in the realm of acquiring personal finance information, “For the real McCoy, you can’t beat the 19th hole on the golf course”. Of course, all countries are run by a series of boys’ gangs, which have graduated to being called cabals. However, most countries are not as tiny as the Republic. Nor, unless they are in Eastern Europe and recovering from recent and dreadful bloodshed, are they as ethnically homogenous.
When you look at the people who have run our banks, our legal system, our medical system, our politics and in fact all the public institutions of the State, it gives the term Catholic hierarchy a much wider meaning. All male, uninterested in debate, convinced that they have always been correct and refusing to admit the possibility of any past mistakes . . . does this remind you of anyone? These are the guys who have to scrabble around for a tame woman to appoint to their boards whenever they think it culturally compulsory to do so. Bertie appointed Celia. The thing is, it’s kind of hard to find a woman when you don’t work with any. I haven’t come up with any printable names for the banks yet, but for years I’ve called St Luke’s Misogyny Towers. On Saturday Colm Keena wrote about the fate of St Luke’s, which may or may not belong to Fianna Fáil.
He reported: “Despite being the only elected politician for the party in Dublin Central, Ms Fitzpatrick does not hold clinics in St Luke’s and never has. She said she did not want to comment on why this was so”. Women are the canary in the coal mine of any hermetically sealed elite; other alien groups will have an even tougher time trying to break in.
With the circles this tight, is it any wonder that enrolment in private schools went up by 35 per cent during the boom? (Weekend Review, front page.) These schools talk about training the leaders of society, and the system is paid for by the taxpayer.
Parents are correct to invest in it because, let’s face it, things have worked out great for the leaders, although perhaps not so well for our society. Refusing to budge from our comfort zone was our undoing.
I say bring in the Northern Protestants – our Prods are too soft. Bring in a bushel of Protestants from north of the Border, and make them teetotal Presbyterians if possible. Place them on the boards of our banks, our semi-State bodies, of our hospitals and of our schools. Pay them whatever the going rate is. Take them golfing if you must. Force yourself to talk to somebody you don’t know, and with whom you have absolutely nothing in common. Then maybe we can start rebuilding.