Book reveals Seanie is sorry — but only for himself
The man credited with turning banker into a swear word has finally broken his silence — silence being crucial to concentration on the golf course — to tell of his suffering since the collapse of Anglo Irish Bank.
Humiliated, bankrupt and abandoned by some former golfing buddies, he feels he’s been blamed unfairly for the financial havoc the outfit he ran for 18 years and chaired for four more has wreaked on the nation.
He couldn’t even enjoy his dinner in the cell where gardaí detained him for questioning last March. It seems the smell from the toilet interfered with his appetite.
Then there was the time reporters first started camping outside his lovely home and he was forced to seek refuge in his local golf club. It was a dreadful imposition as his mind wasn’t on golf at all that day — it was on rugby.
“Leinster were playing Wasps that day in the Heineken Cup and I am saying — I am mad keen on rugby — I want to watch this match rather than be sitting here in a bar on a cold Saturday afternoon.” So what did our hero do? He drove close to his house and snuck in through the back garden. He doesn’t mention that Leinster lost that day. Presumably that is just too painful to recall.
The result of all this outpouring is a book, The FitzPatrick Tapes, compiled from interviews originally meant as off-the-record briefings for the Sunday Times that are now published, with the subject’s agreement, as the definitive account of, as the book puts it: the rise and fall of one man, one bank and one country.
To be fair to authors, Tom Lyons and Brian Carey, they don’t take cheap shots at Seanie by ridiculing the occasions when he recounts his woes with an anguish that makes Peig Sayers sound like Billy Connolly.
This is a thoroughly researched and vivid account of the rise and demise of Anglo, the man who became synonymous with its inflated success and inglorious end, and the onlookers, legislators, collaborators and regulators who should have shouted stop.
But what comes across repeatedly is FitzPatrick’s incredible bravado-infused state of denial about the reckless and at times illegal behaviour of his bank.
He never worried about his own investments, not even an insane gamble on a Nigerian oil venture “because I thought they were going to be okay”.
He insists he didn’t put together the infamous “golden circle” of businessmen who contrived to buy shares in Anglo with Anglo loans to stop share prices falling.
He brushes off as “a mistake” the hiding of his own massive loans from Anglo in another financial institution so that they wouldn’t have to be revealed in the bank’s accounts.
He was “shocked” when the bank was nationalised and is still stunned by his vilification, thinking early on that the fuss would over “by two or three days”.
“When people talk about ruin and losses, I am one of the biggest victims of it.”
The s-word is there but if he’s wearing it pinned to his chest, he’s also got a message on his back that adds “in a limited liability, terms and conditions apply kind-of-way”.
“I don’t feel ashamed, but I do feel regret, very serious regret, and I am sorry that it is going to cause people losses. Anyone who has suffered on that, I really am sorry. But that is it. I have got to get on and live my life.”
He isn’t the only one with questions to answer.
The book reveals Brian Cowen, took a phone call from FitzPatrick while on a trade mission to Malaysia in March 2008, telling him the bank’s shares had just plummeted.
“According to FitzPatrick, Cowen didn’t have much to say. ‘He just said yeah.’” A few months later Cowen spent a day golfing and dining with Seanie and never asked how the bank was. Maybe he didn’t, but if he had so little interest in the affairs of a bank fuelling the biggest property speculation in the state, why was he minister for finance?
But then maybe they were too busy discussing blame deflection strategies. Cowen too has proved himself deft in that particular art.
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