You can bank on the money-men protecting themselves

PINTS, pantomime-style villains and political impotence, the Dáil has it all.

A few intrepid deputies broke into the nine-week Oireachtas summer holiday to hold bailed-out bankers to account this week, but the money-men’s explanations on how they were dealing with mortgage misery proved as slippery as the counter of the Dáil members’ bar when awash with booze during a late-night sitting.

Like the ugly sisters of the financial system, the bosses of Bank of Ireland, AIB and Ulster Bank squirmed under the spotlight as the pantomime was played out.

“He’s behind you,” the audience might have hissed, as BoI’s Richie Boucher, and his buddies, sauntered into the Oireachtas arena, like something straight from central casting, to play the role of capitalist tools.

But they were now in front of the TDs, though giving precious little away — certainly not any hope to the wretched souls consumed by the debt culture pushed at them at the peak of the bubble boom.

Or, perhaps, Alice Through the Looking Glass would be a better analogy for the encounter, as the rules put in place by the Central Bank seem to better suit the surrealist pages of a Lewis Carroll novel than the real world.

Despite being elected to sort out the mortgage mess that threatens to stretch the current decade of stagnation into the future, ministers dithered and drifted for two years, before finally getting the Central Bank to act, last spring.

Suddenly, 20% of distressed mortgage holders were to have been offered sustainable solutions, by the end of June, to unblock the log-jam.

Finally, a bit of reality was to enter the process, and AIB boss, David Duffy, boasted to the Oireachtas finance committee that his organisation had issued 8,600 such resolutions — yet, on closer inspection, it turned out that 5,894 of these ‘solutions’ were threatening legal letters that would start the train of repossession running.

So, some 74% of AIB’s ‘solutions’ are letters that would result in turfing families out of their homes; with BoI, it is just under half, and, at Ulster Bank, the figure soars to almost 80% — all three institutions were saved by the taxpayer, often the same taxpayer they are now attempting to dump on the street, so that they can claim to be doing something to ease that taxpayer’s misery. This is a twisted inversion.

This ludicrous situation is stood over by Central Bank governor, Patrick Honohan, who refuses to intervene and put a break on this madness.

But, then, this delusional attitude to economics pervades so much of government thinking.

Some €9.5bn of public money has been pumped into the banks, with the explicit intention of being used to ease the mortgage crisis, yet only a fraction has been put to this purpose.

The vast bulk is being hoarded on the banks’ balance sheets, to give them the kind of fake facade of stability that helped tip us into disaster in the first place.

The Taoiseach and Tánaiste have often compared the banking system to a critically-ill patient they have heroically nursed back from the brink of death, and herald his/her imminent recovery as Ireland seeks to escape the financial restraints of the Troika bailout by the end of the year.

But stress-testing for the banks has been put back well into 2014, which begs the question: why would you release a patient with a history of self-harming, and a dangerous and abusive attitude to the rest of society, without carrying out the necessary checks to ensure they have truly changed their ways?

It took a suicide to get Enda Kenny and the Environment Minister, Phil Hogan, to finally act over the scandal of Priory Hall.

What will it take to get the Government to move on the far more complex issue of the debt crisis?

The members’ bar was closed when the finance committee sat in session, but the hangover from the booze-fest atmosphere, which seared into the public mind on the infamous ‘Lapgate’ night of the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Bill, kicked-in with a vengeance as the tab takings were revealed.

Mr Kenny seems to believe that getting TDs to show up in the chamber for a couple of extra hours a week, under his incredibly timid ‘reform’ programme, will somehow restore public confidence in parliament.

That confidence has disappeared as quickly as those 232 pints and bottles of beer and stout, 31 quarter-bottles of wine, and 46 glasses of vodka, gin, and brandy did on the night deputies were being generously waged to concentrate on some of the most argued-over legislation for a generation.

But like the legal-letter scam by the banks, Mr Kenny’s Dáil shake-up is just another con-job, which is all too easy to see through, and only fuels the pervading aura of cynicism that hangs over public life in this country.

The Oireachtas has allowed the banks, which owe their continued existence to the generosity of the taxpayer, to repay that favour in a flurry of threatening letters and legal proceedings for forced repossession, so as to deal with a crisis they were culpable in creating.

While recently prostrating itself before the Troika, in one of its quarterly reports, the finance department obsequiously delighted in telling our overlords how it had pushed through new legislation to overturn a High Court block on repossessions, to ensure the banks could throw people out of their homes with much greater speed and efficiency.

This, coupled with the missed opportunity of the insolvency legislation that finally comes into force next Monday, and which — of course — leaves the banks with the whip hand, does not suggest a particularly pleasant future ahead of us.

Ulster Bank’s Jim Brown whined that it was “not fair” on the institution that some customers were refusing to pay their mortgages, which no doubt it is — but what would any of these banks ever understand about the notion of fairness?

Given their risible pretence at seeking sustainable solutions, the banks have shown themselves to be no Snow White — but, unfortunately, TDs and the Central Bank have more than proved themselves to be the mortgage dwarfs.