Treated like idiots as that’s how we behave

WHEN record end-of-year tax returns, up 5% to €47.86bn, were announced in recent days, it was also pointed out that this small country’s interest bill was €6.74bn, a little more than 10% of the bank bailout. 

To give those figures some context: there are a little over two million people in paid work in the Republic. What productive, but indebted, little elves we are.

It must be assumed is that a significant wedge of that €6.74bn went to pay interest on money borrowed to rescue banks ruined by property gambling. That bill is the most spectacular example of the impunity enjoyed by banks and the hundreds of individuals responsible for the banks’ behaviour and — dare it be imagined, much less said — civic morality and social responsibility. Their failure has had no commensurate consequences, nor is it, at this juncture, likely to.