Time to repay most expensive bank-rescue debt decade after St Patrick’s Day Massacre

The now-defunct Anglo Irish ended up transferring €34.1bn of toxic loans to Nama

Anglo Irish Bank – renamed Irish Bank Resolution Corporation and put into liquidation five years ago – contributed almost 46 per cent of all the €74bn of loans transferred by five lenders to Nama. Photograph: Dara Mac Donaill

Anglo Irish Bank – renamed Irish Bank Resolution Corporation and put into liquidation five years ago – contributed almost 46 per cent of all the €74bn of loans transferred by five lenders to Nama. Photograph: Dara Mac Donaill

Ten years ago today, the market value of Anglo Irish Bank plunged up to 22 per cent as skittish international investors zeroed in on problems building up in Ireland’s banks, as they scanned the globe for risks in the immediate aftermath of US investment bank Bear Stearns’s near collapse.

The so-called St Patrick’s Day Massacre is etched in the memory of many here as the moment that people began to fret about the tens of billions of commercial property loans in the Irish banking system in a faltering real-estate market. (That’s despite the fact that Irish bank shares had been falling for more than a year at that stage.)

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