Hear no evil, see no evil: Cowen tries to make a virtue of ignorance

THE gyrations at Anglo Irish Bank continue to reverberate with fresh revelations coming out regularly. Yesterday, Dermot Ahern was on RTÉ arguing about the damage that disclosure of the names of the Anglo 10 would do to Irish banks.

Ironically, on Wednesday, the largest Swiss bank, UBS, agreed to divulge the details of some 250 accounts of Americans suspected of using the bank to evade US taxes.

“UBS sincerely regrets the compliance failures in its US cross-border business that have been identified by the various government investigations in Switzerland and the US, as well as our own internal review,” the UBS chairman announced. “We accept full responsibility for these improper activities.”

The bank admitted conspiring to defraud the US Internal Revenue Service and has agreed to pay $780 million to settle a sweeping federal investigation into its activities.

On Thursday, an American tax investigator provided a sworn court declaration that in 2004 he discovered details that UBS had 52,000 secret American account-holders with assets of around $15 billion.

Swiss banking secrecy has been under pressure ever since the disclosure that the country’s banks hid millions that the Nazis robbed from Jewish people.

Every decent person should welcome the demise of these secrecy laws. Any banks that are undermined by such disclosures had something to hide in the first place.

The Anglo 10 were invited to invest a total of €300m in Anglo Irish Bank shares. They each had to put up €7.5m of their own money and each was then allowed to borrow €22.5m to purchase the remainder of the €30m in bank shares which were used as collateral for those loans.

Hence the 10 were to put up €75m and borrow the other €225m to buy the shares, using those shares as collateral. Under a 1993 High Court ruling, following the collapse of Guinness Peat Aviation, however, Bank of Ireland could not compel Colm Barrington to repay a loan for shares, because those shares, which had been accepted as collateral for the loan, had since become worthless.

The offer seemed like such a good deal that the 10 borrowed €451m, and the bank is now writing off “in the region of €300m” of that as unrecoverable.

So who lost out in the Anglo Irish Bank deal? The Anglo 10 may have lost €151m. But who is going to pay the other €300m?

Look in the mirror. The Irish people will, because they now own that bank. The deal reeked of stock manipulation. But were the Anglo 10 culprits, or were they victims of their own greed and a massive confidence trick?

Brian Cowen may well be justified in not naming them, but he has gone even further. By not wishing to know the names, he has tried to raise ignorance to the level of a political virtue.

Although the opposition seemed to be hinting that some might be members of the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party, this would seem unlikely because they had to have €7.5m to invest in the first place.

Some of them probably contributed to Fianna Fáil, but they probably contributed to other parties, too.

During the Watergate scandal in the US, some people sought the protective cloak of “plausible deniability”. They wished to be in a position to deny that they knew of any shenanigans, so ignorance was paraded as a political virtue.

But it did not work. Nixon was ousted and his henchmen went to jail. Yet Brian Cowen and his Government have been trying to elevate ignorance to a new political status in this country.

Frankly, I prefer a leader who knows what is happening rather than a supposed leader who tries to hide behind the cloak of ignorance.

This cloak of ignorance has become a particularly fashionable garb in Fianna Fáil circles these days.

Barry Andrews did not read the report into the clerical sex abuse in Cloyne, Micheál Martin did not read the report into the illegal fees at the nursing homes and Brian Cowen capped the whole thing by announcing he had never even read the Lisbon Treaty before last year’s referendum.

Brian Lenihan admitted he did not read the report that would have supposedly informed him about the cosy financial arrangements between Irish Life and Permanent and Anglo Irish Bank.

Ironically, if he had read the report he would not have learned those details because they were not in it.

It was like the old story of the politician who always seemed so cocksure of himself that a journalist asked him if he had ever made a mistake?

“I did, once,” the politicians replied. “I thought I made a mistake.”

His only mistake was in thinking that he had once made a mistake, whereas he was right, but he mistakenly thought he was wrong. If you are confused about that, you now know how Brian Lenihan feels. Those officials at the Department of Finance who knew what was happening and did not bother to inform Lenihan were providing him with plausible deniability.

Fianna Fáil should know that ignorance is a lousy excuse in politics. Remember Albert Reynolds protested that he and his colleagues did not know there was a precedent for the extradition of Fr Brendan Smyth for paedophile offences. A supposed monk named Duggan had already been extradited to Britain for such offences.

With the Labour party threatening to withdraw from the coalition government with Fianna Fáil in 1994, Reynolds stepped down as Taoiseach, but he was telling the truth when he said he did not understand the significance of the Duggan case.

It was not a precedent for the extradition of Smyth because Duggan was charged with offences that had been committed only months earlier whereas some of the allegations against Smyth stretched back over decades.

POOR Albert became a victim of his own unwitting ignorance whereas Brian Cowen is now trying to protect himself by covering his eyes and ears with the cloak of ignorance. It is like Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of the king with the magic suit of clothes — it deceived only the king and those who wished to be fooled.

This Government has handled the ignorance issue so badly that even when they get it right, they think they have got it wrong. Hence they appear as vulnerable as they are cranky, and this has developed into a virtual invitation for opponents to take them on.

Last year we had the fiasco of the striking train drivers in Cork, and now it’s the turn of bus drivers in Dublin. Our economy is already reeling and is going to be further hurt by the decline in tourism. Our biggest market has been our neighbours across the Irish Sea.

Next week England is coming to Dublin to play Ireland in rugby. It should be a tremendous occasion to boost tourism from the British market and thus saves jobs. But instead of facilitating those who wish to work, the Dublin bus drivers are going on strike in a naked attempt to hold the country to ransom.

This is nothing short of national sabotage. If they persist, they will deserve the same fate as Arthur Scargill and those idiots who blindly followed him and his ilk into oblivion.