How to get cash out of a mattress — bring back national loans

WHATEVER happened to the nation’s tried and trusted friend — the national loan — as a means of providing funds for infrastructural development while at the same time creating a secure investment opportunity bearing a reasonable return to subscribers?

The concept seems, like the hole in the ozone layer of some years back, to have got lost by the media wayside — or could it be that ‘wiser counsels’ prevailed, possibly the purveyors of financial ‘services’ that the nation is now expected to rescue from the dregs of mismanagement, or worse, perpetrated under the unsuspecting nose of the financial regulator?

Many of us suckers are still smarting at having had to cough up a bank levy to cover the deplorable, if not criminal, mismanagement by one of our major banks in the not-too-distant past and now we are asked to stand idly by while Anglo Irish Bank revel in its good fortune at not having to go under.