Payback time - AIB shareholders’ decision

HARD-PRESSED taxpayers will be heartened to learn that AIB shareholders have given their backing to measures which will finally enable the rescued bank to repay €1.7bn of the €21bn needed to bail them out. 

The crucial vote took place at yesterday’s extraordinary general meeting of a so-called pillar bank of the country’s financial institutions which lost the run of itself in the madness of the inappropriately named Celtic Tiger era.

Those lunatic days were notorious for the light-touch regulation of the banks which funded the mortgages of people desperate to get on the property ladder, many of whom are now being evicted in the courts at the behest of the banks which also doled out money to greedy developers as if it was going out of fashion.

Effectively, between them in one form or another, they brought the country to its knees. Only now is what remains of a once-burgeoning economy showing signs of recovering to health, as illustrated by the AIB payback but it will be a long, long time before all of its debts are returned to the State.