It’s a zero sum game and we need one million Croke Parks to play it

THERE is some ambiguity as to who invented the concept of “zero” – probably one of the most important and vital numbers used in maths and commerce since around the first century AD.

The Babylonians, Greeks, Chinese and Italians all used variations of the concept, but it was the Hindu-Arabic mathematicians who developed and refined it to the format we use today.

The invention of the zero at the time was a major breakthrough, probably akin to the invention of the wheel.

In commerce and in politics, the zero, however, has been diluted and sanitised almost to the point of elimination, sometimes for convenience, but often to obfuscate, hide and confuse.

Take, for instance, the controversies over the Government bank guarantee and NAMA’s purchase of the banks’ toxic debts.

We are told that these sums are €400 billion and €57bn, amounts that make little or no sense to most of us.

But if we use the full power and significance of the zero, the enormity of these sums become more transparent, ie, €400,000,000,000 (11 zeros) and €57,000,000,000 (yes, nine zeros), truly unprecedented and mind-boggling amounts by any standards.

To put these outrageous sums in context, they are equivalent to €100,000 and €17,000 respectively for each person in the country, not just €100k and €17k in their more sanitised notation.

To put it another way, Croke Park, when full, holds 80,000 people. If you substitute people for euros, then 57,000,000,000 would require almost one million – yes, 1,000,000 – Croke Parks to contain it.

It is frightening when you consider that these vast amounts have to be borrowed (eventually maybe, in the case of the guarantee) by each and every one of us, the citizens and future citizens of this small state, to support and shore up seriously delinquent and sometimes criminal private banking companies.

Recent memory will show that these same toxic Irish banks have a history of fraudulent overcharging, gross mismanagement, recklessness and tax evasion, topped off with an abundance of incompetence, stupidity and arrogance. There is general agreement that their treasonous and greedy behaviour will visit unprecedented hardship and penury on the state for generations to come.

It is surely beyond credibility that our rudderless and discredited Government, on our behalf, but certainly without our consent, considers it right and prudent to gamble – yes, gamble – our future and our children’s future to save these dubious and rotten institutions.

Many well-respected economists believe there is no moral or commercial justification for rescuing them again, this time at such potentially ruinous cost.

These now zombie and disgraced institutions should have been given a big zero and allowed to fail as befits their ethos and behaviour.

If the political will and wit were there, we could have had a new and clean banking system up and running by now, franchised by the intrinsically more ethical Canadians or Scandinavians and supported by existing foreign-owned banks. NAMA is a pointless black hole where our €57,000,000,000 will disappear up the greedy snouts of the bankers, lawyers, spindoctors and “consultants”.

Note that the Bank of Ireland has already lost nearly €1,000,000,000 in the first six months of this year, the combined bank losses will approach €7,000,000,000 this year alone, equivalent to the amount poured into them last December by the Government on our behalf. The poor idiot taxpayer will inherit a financial millstone for generations and the banks will remain in their zombie state for years post NAMA.

Rest assured the raison d’etre for NAMA, the badly needed credit for small business, will be zero or thereabouts. Bringing back the power and transparency of the zero may help in some small way to demonstrate the sheer lunacy of NAMA and stop Cowen and his Fianna Fáil cowboys before it’s too late.

John Cooney

Wilton Road

Cork