When will the penny finally drop?

Watching Prime Time last week I had a very bizarre experience. While I didn’t actually weep I found my eyes filling with tears as I sat through the figures they quoted regarding the other potential uses for the money being used to bail out the Irish banks.

Many of you will have seen them but I certainly feel they are worth repeating. By current estimation, €70.5 billion is the amount of money that will be pumped into Irish banks by the Irish taxpayer.
That is €16,000 for every man woman and child in the country. This would pay for 108 new children’s hospitals; build 23,500 new primary schools with 16 classrooms in each; abolish income tax for six years; fund unemployment payments for 25 years; scrap all fares on Irish rail, Dublin Bus and Bus Éireann for 101 years; buy a malaria net for everyone in Africa at risk of malaria every year for 14 years; build 172 Aviva Stadia, six in every county or send half a million Irish people into space.
The real success of the programme’s producers in presenting the figures in this way was that it finally made the figures real. Media reports regarding billions of Euro and politicians speaking about millions as though they were small change, have led us, understandably, to lose sight of just how much we are dealing with.
Seeing the items listed above identified as potentially achievable and comparing them with what was actually done with the money was heartbreaking and exemplified the injustice of the current banking shambles.
In the past, I would have considered shambles too soft a word to describe the severity of what is facing the people of Ireland as a result of banks operating with impunity to serve their own avarice at the expense of everyone else. Having recently read of the origin of the word however, I am fast coming to believe that it is nothing short of perfect to describe the situation.
The word, from late middle English, originally described a ‘meat market’ but from the late 16th century on, it came to mean ‘a place of carnage’. While we have softened this to ‘scene of disorder’ in modern usage I feel that, by returning to its late 16th century sense, we have a perfect descriptive term for what the bankers and the nation’s hapless politicians unleashed. 
While I would never consider myself an apologist for Fianna Fáil there is an element of truth in what they repeatedly cried out during the shambles and the recent election. They claimed that they had been victims of a global financial crisis along with the rest of the world. They were careful to leave out their role in the crisis but it is worth remembering just how the world was plunged into financial meltdown.
The winner of the best documentary film at last year’s Academy Awards was a piece of work called Inside Job.
While the style is as slick and American as you might expect, the story wrapped within the glossy packaging is both revelatory and detailed to an admirable degree. It exposes in plain language the exact type of deals, double-dealing, deregulation and blatant fraud that led to the collapse of the international money markets and shows with absolute clarity just how unfettered capitalism killed itself. More importantly, it shows how the irresponsible actions of a relatively small group of people bent on self-enrichment shattered the lives of millions of people all over the world. Their actions are similar in many ways to the actions of those involved in the Irish banking system that was wiped out in the tsunami of bad practice and Mickey Mouse accounting that struck the globe in 2008.
“He was all about power and money and taking what he wanted without working for it. He didn’t like any resistance.”
Those words could equally be applied to many bankers all over the world but, in fact, describe the infamous Mafia boss and “King of New York” John Gotti, the former head of the Gambino crime syndicate in the US.  They were spoken by Patrick Cotter, a young prosecutor who worked on the successful prosecution of Gotti that spanned a number of years in the early 1990s.
This rightful pursuit of justice has not been replicated in the case of the financial criminals who have wrought so much destruction in more recent times. The reasons for this may be many but the close relationship between politics, high finance and big business must rank among the main reasons for the lack of justice.
There may be a deeper explanation however. The following quote has been attributed to John Steinbeck online but I’ve been unable to verify this. Whoever said it, there are concepts within it worth extrapolating.
“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
Could this equally be used to describe the mindset that arose in Ireland during the boom years of the Celtic Tiger? The encouragement offered to all to get involved in property speculation was rife, excessive lifestyles based on credit were taken to be a new norm and all of this was based on the false belief that capitalism without regulation could continue to produce wealth without end.
What is a little distressing is that now, when the lie has been exposed, whether or not the people of the nation agree, the neo-liberalists of the EU/IMF will see to it that a nation which works to serve its people in as fair and socially responsible way will be further from reality than ever before in years to come.
In the meantime, the Irish taxpayer continues to pay average wages of €100,000 per anum to staff at the shell of a financial institution called Anglo Irish Bank while the poorest and most vulnerable foot the bill with the quality and viability of their everyday lives.