Good day for FitzPatrick and Quinn’s cheerleaders to reflect

Among the reams of words written in recent days about Seán Quinn and Seán FitzPatrick, the star-crossed titans doomed to become entangled on an Icarus-like plunge to earth, the question that comes begging time and again is why; why were they unable to acknowledge the enormity of their personal contribution to the 2008 crash ?

The similarities between the two were obvious. They grew small businesses into enormous companies and took enormous gambles with other people’s money. Both viewed themselves as indispensable and woefully outstayed their time with those companies.

Both were blind to the outsized roles they had played in sinking the economy. And at a time when people were being battered by that national disaster and needing the balm of a straight apology from anyone, neither man could bring himself to do so.

A mutually affirming bubble attitude was in evidence after his disastrous RTÉ performance when the congratulatory calls flooded i

“Anglo Irish Bank has made mistakes because we are in the business of risk and I’ll admit that ... Have we been reckless? No. I don’t believe that”, FitzPatrick said confidently in that 2008 RTÉ interview with Marian Finucane. He had nothing to apologise for, he said.

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“Overall I don’t think that I owe the Irish taxpayer any apology,” Quinn told the Financial Times in October 2012. He went even further and told the British newspaper he believed he deserved public gratitude.

Both were afflicted with colossal levels of self-belief, of course, but crucially neither of them could have fuelled that sense of invincibility on self-belief alone. Others had to polish, protect and sustain their works and pomp.

When it all went belly-up, the regulator slouched away, politicians were ousted, developers put up their hands and marched into the National Asset Management Agency, and some bankers went to jail. Quinn was jailed for contempt for a few weeks and FitzPatrick barely avoided it.

Everyday colluders

But what about the everyday colluders essential to the schemes and the cover-ups? The flint-eyed clients and mates? The other big beasts who developed a personal relationship – they called it “relationship banking” – with FitzPatrick’s bank.

A mutually affirming bubble attitude was in evidence after his disastrous RTÉ performance when the congratulatory calls flooded in – from David Drumm, from former Bank of Ireland chief executive Pat Molloy, Mick Bailey and other developer clients, saying “Anglo had taken too much shite”, as FitzPatrick told Tom Lyons and Brian Carey, authors of The FitzPatrick Tapes, a few years later. “Nothing has come back to haunt me in that I believe everything I said.”

This is where FitzPatrick and Quinn sharply diverged. While FitzPatrick drew his fan bubble from the movers and shakers end of the business world, Quinn’s came from a cold and frightened crowd like the 5,000 assembled for a Quinn support rally in Ballyconnell on a Sunday evening in October 2012.

The Irish people are stuck with well over a billion in Quinn insurance levies and €2.3 billion owed to Anglo Irish Bank

A tearful couple who had never heard of contracts for difference explained to me how the grass was growing up in the middle of the streets of west Cavan before Seán Quinn came along.

Distressed small borrowers had somehow found common cause with a man who had actually owned a quarter of a bank and used his insurance company reserves to gamble it away.

From the crowded stage, Peter Quinn – 30th president of the GAA and Seán’s brother – lashed the media for its purported view of Quinn marchers as “morons and gobshites”, “culchies and idiots” launching that convenient rural vs urban narrative. Ciara Quinn drew rapturous applause when she declared they were in a war, that she and her siblings were the true and rightful owners of the Quinn group of companies.

Delusion and entitlement

For nine years that blind denial, self-pity and self-delusion bound in pride and entitlement have been acted out at enormous financial cost to the State and human cost to the Quinns.

As well as the massive costs for global investigations and lawyers, the Irish people are stuck with well over a billion in Quinn insurance levies and €2.3 billion owed to Anglo Irish Bank.

The siblings, now with children of their own and a betting company to run, ironically, appear to have called off the war. Their father is not sure. The 75 year old tells one paper that he had harboured ambitions to oust the new management but that he is “slowing up”, then tells another a few days later that he will do anything in his power “to get those boys out”.

The intervening years have been punctuated by repeated acts of savagery, torture, vandalism and intimidation against the Mannok (formerly Quinn group) directors and families. Quinn extends the opposite of sympathy to them.

“All of the farmers wouldn’t p**s on these boys if they were on fire. Not a farmer in the area or member of CFL [the Cavan, Fermanagh and Leitrim Community Group established to support Quinn] if they meet on the street would speak to these guys,” he told the Irish News last week.

He claims that the CFL members “own” the business. A CFL meeting held in Ballinamore last August chaired by a local solicitor was attended by Seán Quinn, according to the Fermanagh Herald. Presumably they have a few billion to cover the costs of the proposed buyback.

Do the cheerleaders and colluders of both camps ever look back and wonder what they might have done differently, when there was still a chance of redemption? Today might be a good day for a review.