Nation's malaise visible in venom flung at Quinn

His father sold a bit of land to a gravel man one time and, after he died, Seán said, “I’m going to keep that land and sell the gravel”, and so he bought a lorry and his mother signed over the land and she did the phones for him as he began the business.

Elsewhere people were lying in ditches waiting to blow someone’s brains out, but from the start Seán Quinn would have no truck with them, and those who know the hidden history of the Troubles will agree that he never paid a penny of protection money though they sometimes burned his machinery. Which is ironic because there are those who will also say certain Irish banks along the Border in fear of being burned out were able to structure their equations smooth enough for money to slide into dubious causes, and grease palms that held Kalashnikovs.

Maybe he was never as clever as the bankers, though tragically he had a huge respect for Anglo-Irish. That’s the real story. D’Arcy nailed it in a question last weekend: “Were the accounts that Anglo-Irish presented to Seán Quinn authentic, audited, correct and honest?”

And suppose it was ever proven that Anglo-Irish offered Quinn false documents in its dealings with him. Suppose the accounts were all sly equations that hid the real situation in that bank. Would he be culpable then? If he believed them and they swindled him? Because even a dimwit peasant in trepidation of the master’s rod can see that Quinn didn’t destroy Anglo-Irish. Anglo-Irish destroyed Quinn, and the country. And for Quinn to be the target of the nation’s vitriol and venom says more about the nation’s disease than it does about Seán Quinn.