Always a quip in his back pocket

He said that he picked the infamous sum Anglo needed on guarantee night “out of me arse”, later leaving for the US and telling a reporter who tracked him down to “have a bit of respect”.

But despite his attempts to quietly vanish into history, the shadow of David Drumm still hangs over Ireland — some seven years after the financial crisis.

After the September 2008 bank guarantee brought Anglo’s problems into sharp focus, Mr Drumm resigned as CEO in December 2008 and fled to the US, with one person who saw his former Malahide home in north Dublin saying he “even took the light bulbs”.

Setting up near Boston, Massachusetts, where he made his name in the 1990s as an Anglo manager who aggressively targeted developers, the former auditor attempted to continue where he left off.

Amid ongoing Irish Government talk of extraditing the banker from his Cape Cod bolt hole, Mr Drumm filed for bankruptcy in the US in a bid to walk away from debts of €8.5m to this country so he could start again with a clean slate abroad.

Rejecting the bid through 30 objections, presiding judge Frank Bailey said the claim the banker was not still a man of means was “not remotely credible” and “knowingly fraudulent”.

Mr Drumm, still a person of interest to authorities who want to question him about hidden Anglo loans and other matters, described the decision as a “witch hunt”, and had a similar answer to RTÉ during a 2010 doorstep at his €4.5m US mansion.

Confronted by RTÉ’s then Washington correspondent Charlie Bird, who had to resort to shouting through a letter box to see if he wanted to talk to “the Irish people”, Mr Drumm lashed out by saying he was with his family, threatened to call the police, and told the reporter: “Have a bit of respect”.

Told “there are taxpayers at home who would like some answers”, the banker said: “Did you not see the sign? Leave. Now.”

That came before the 2013 Anglo tapes, comprising the firm’s internal phone calls, which revealed he told colleagues he picked the sum Anglo got on guarantee night “out of me arse”.

“Have a bit of respect,” indeed.