Banks may have got a haircut but taxpayers got scalped

IT is the bank that ate Ireland and now Anglo is back and more ravenous for cash than ever, gnawing on what’s left of the economic carcass of the nation.

The two Brians looked frightened and lost, locked into the lethal embrace of the financial monster they could not stop themselves feeding with State funds.

They pumped €4bn into it in the hope it would go away, but that only aroused its appetite and now its back for another €8.3bn, then a probable €10bn, not to mention the €18bn from Nama underwritten by the taxpayer.

That’s €40.3bn pumped into the Bank of the Living Dead. That’s a full €7bn more than the entire Irish tax take this year. That’s equivalent to nearly a quarter of the nation’s whole gross domestic product. That’s the economics of the madhouse.

When the numbers broke across the House the mood was sombre in the extreme – the gloom only momentarily lifted by the mocking opposition laughter when Mr Lenihan expressed his hope that Anglo could one day turn a profit.

The numbers are getting so awesome for the Anglo bail-out they are now approaching the figure the Government claims it would cost to wind the grotesque edifice to greed down completely. But if the Government had not included Anglo in the guarantee scheme that fateful night in September 2008 – as many experts at the time warned them not to – then the cost to the taxpayer would have been much smaller as it was not a systemic player, more a plaything for the plutocratic banker-developer class.

That was judgment day, and the two Brians exhibited very poor judgment that day indeed, a mistake which has come back to haunt us €40.3bn times over.

Anglo alone is consuming more than half the €70bn plus gushing into the busted system as the bubble boom continues to brutally explode into national bust.

As the full scale of the financial disaster was unfolding centre stage, other telling mini-dramas were playing out on its periphery across the Dáil.

As the nation trembled on the brink of fiscal abyss, the FF-Green coalition fractured still further as John Gormley and grumpy Government backbenchers were caught in an unseemly stand-off.

The FF backbenchers demanded the minister danced attendance upon them in their parliamentary party room, he refused to budge from his office. The pettiness lasted hours, and was all to redolent of the bad blood seeping into a festering wound in the coalition body politic – a wound ripped-open the night Trevor Sargent fell from office and Mr Gormley and co were so unconfident in their partners innocence they could not immediately absolve Fianna Fáil of triggering the deed.

Elsewhere in the chamber, Bertie Ahern could be spotted leaving the scene of the crime as he slipped out while Mr Lenihan was still on his feet delivering the bad news. Bertie’s brief presence in his perch meant that for a while Mr Lenihan stood physically, where he stands fiscally – trapped in the mire partially created by the present Taoiseach and his predecessor, Mr Boom and Mr Bust.

Not that any of the troubled trio would admit any of the blame of course. Oh, no. It was all down to those bankers. Never mind that the watchdogs were told to close their eyes, the regulators laid off regulating and fuel was poured on the flames of the over-heating property frenzy.

At one point Sinn Féin’s Aengus O Snodaigh railed against “toxic psycho substances”, but it turned out he wasn’t on about the horrendous “haircut” being taken on the bailed-out toxic loans, just what was available in head shops.

But then you’d probably need to be on drugs to make sense of this banking mess and the way the Government has reacted to it.

“The detailed information that has emerged from the banks in the course of the Nama process is truly shocking – at every hand’s turn our worst fears have been surpassed,” Mr Lenihan admitted as if enmeshed in a horror film.

After so many promises that we had turned the corner, Mr Lenihan again promised us that Bail-out Tuesday would draw a line under the crisis “once and for all” – well, at least until the next time he bails the banks out, that is.

More fiscal fantasy from the Finance Department – the Ministry of Taxes and Tears – more borrowed money propping-up a Government more than ever living on borrowed time.

The banks may have taken the haircut, but it was the taxpayers who got scalped.