Smugness of the banks is a bit rich

IT can be mentally healthy to ignore one’s prejudices and take deep breaths, ignore the sore tummy and accept that sometimes things cannot be controlled.

Institutions are comprised of humans, and therefore flawed. As we all are.

Yes, I’m a ‘customer’ of the Ulster Bank. Unless you’re a committed conspiracy theorist (this was a trial run in anticipation of the collapse of the euro), it’s best to accept that the RBS computer meltdown was an unanticipated event they are doing their best to fix.

Over the last two weeks, when there have been questions about cut-backs in the bank’s IT section, bonuses for executives and transparency, I have tried to remain Zen.

Money deposited into my account has yet to show up, and, as a result, my mortgage and other direct debits have not been paid. I have been like a glassy lake in the face of these travails: until last weekend, when I noticed that Ulster Bank has charged me a number of penalties for bouncing my direct debits.

I have a car loan — with the Ulster Bank — but, in this instance, the direct debit was paid and my account pushed helpfully into the red.

Over the last decade, the Catholic Church has been repeatedly accused of institutional arrogance: but the smugness of believing you represent God on Earth seems dwarfed by the self-satisfaction of representing Mammon.

It is many years since banks in this country regarded themselves as a business like any other, or, indeed, that they were providing a useful service: rather, they were the infallible managers of our financial well-being, whether we liked it or not.

On the macro level, we are all too well aware of how banks — private businesses — can bring a national economy to its knees while we have to pick up the tab. But on the micro level, too, banks have wormed their way into the personal lives of pretty much every adult citizen in this State. You may own the wages you earn, but you have no say in what way those wages are transmitted to you.

They must be paid into a bank. We are universally encouraged to pay all our bills from that bank account, while that bank charges you money for the privilege of spending your money.

This, apparently, is ‘convenient’. In the western world, democratic freedom is all too often conjoined to economic freedom, yet how can we define ourselves as economically free when we are in thrall to a number of massively powerful private businesses that can operate without impunity, and obviously couldn’t care one jot what the public thinks.

People may fret about yielding up part of sovereignty to Europe and the troika; but we gave it to the banks years ago.