The saga of two banks with a real twist in the tale

STORY-TIME at Leinster House and today’s offering is A Tale of Two Banks.

Bank A is a homely place ruled by trusted leaders and run by loyal servants who feel their work is valued and their opinions respected.

Visitors to this happy land, otherwise known as customers, find the unrestrained freedom of expression they encounter highly infectious and regularly join in the healthy exchange of views.

Bank A has a culture so sound and appealing that really it is only fair Cork be asked to relinquish its title of City of Culture 2005 so that the whole shebang can be relocated to bank headquarters in Dublin.

Bank B, on the other hand, is a glum place administered by characters who are only to be trusted because of the fear of how they would react were they to find out that someone in their midst lacked trust in them.

Bank B makes it known it prefers machines to people, a “main weakness” of its past being that it was “not automated enough” and “relied too much on manual intervention which resulted in a higher rate of error than was acceptable.”

Bank B has a culture so unpleasant, it would only find its match at the bottom of a petri dish after several weeks of experimentation with a sample of mould.

The twist in the tale is that A is B because the bank is AIB. Or at least that’s how the country’s biggest financial institution was presented at the Oireachtas Committee on Finance and the Public Service yesterday.

AIB chairman Dermot Gleeson and chief executive Michael Buckley were the Brothers Grimm, storytellers extraordinaire, spinning a tale so jam-packed with positivity it could have been sponsored by Chivers.

The committee was surly children, long outgrown fairy stories and partial to asking questions to undermine the heroic attributes of the protagonists and sabotage all prospects of a happy ending.

With plots like DIRT and Faldor to explore, intrigue over foreign exchange to examine and characters like Rusnak to spice up the storyline, the session had the potential to produce an epic, gripping yarn full of subterfuge, strife and struggle but ultimately redemption and resolution.

Instead, the pace was slow, the delivery uneven and the plot desperately confused, while the ending felt like someone had torn out the final page and left the whole conclusion up in the air. It’s no wonder kids watch so much telly.