Banks must share some of the pain to get economy moving again

DISPROVING the truism that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, one of Ireland’s leading bankers, in an effort to rehabilitate the banks’ public image, decided to impart some of his sage advice this week.

In a lengthy interview in the Sunday Business Post, the new president of the Irish Banking Federation John Reynolds railed against Government plans to allow consumers write down mortgage debt, contained in new personal insolvency legislation.

Anyone reading the piece and expecting a modicum of self-reproach from the spokesperson for those financial institutions that managed, with the help of our previous incompetent Government, to bankrupt this once sovereign republic, was soon sorely disappointed.