O’Reilly: Culture of greed will take a long time to go

The European ombudsman, Emily O’Reilly, says it takes a long time for a culture of greed to leach out of society.

President Michael D Higgins said recently he believed the greedy attitudes highlighted by leaked Anglo tapes were not shared by the people of Ireland.

However, Ms O’Reilly said she had yet to be convinced that Irish attitudes had changed since the crash.

“I notice people are getting excited about the property market and I think we need to keep an eye on the handbag-buying in Brown Thomas, because that to me is the real maker of what is going on.”

In an interview with RTÉ’s Miriam O’Callaghan, Ms O’Reilly said she believed a lot of the lessons people think they have learned would be thrown out the window if people had money again.

While she admired President Higgins for speaking out, it was the outcome of all what has happened that she was concerned about.

“It is how the banking system behaves whenever it rectifies itself; it is how we as a people behave when the money starts coming back in again.”

Earlier, Ms O’Reilly said the most difficult period of her time as Ireland’s ombudsman was when the Government ignored her report into a controversial fishing compensation scheme. She felt she had no option in 2009 but to publicly challenge the Government which had refused to follow her recommendation on the Lost at Sea Scheme.

The report was sparked by the case of Francis Byrne, a fishing boat owner who lost his life, along with his 16-year-old son, Jimmy and three other crew, off the coast of Donegal in 1981.

His widow and young family of five boys and three girls was denied a grant under the 2001 Lost at Sea scheme, set up to help fishing families who had lost boats at sea to get back into the industry.

“For us this was a very big deal; this was taking out your nuclear weapon and hoping it would go off and have impact,” she said.