Politicians, not bankers, brought Ireland down

I hope the acquittal of Sean Fitzpatrick will be the first step in debunking the ‘wisdom’ that bad bankers broke Ireland.

The bankers were incompetent, and unwise in the scale of their lending, but they did what bankers have always done — they lent money to feed demand, on the reasonable expectation that the borrower understood he had to pay it back.

In this case, the borrowers were a cabal of monopoly-playing developers, drunk on the affections of the ruling political party.