My great privilege to report on banking's dire upheaval

This is my final “Bottom Line” column as Finance Correspondent for The Irish Times before I move to the United States to become Washington Correspondent. It has been a tumultuous five years covering the demise of the Irish banks from the peaks they held in 2007 to the deep gullies out of which they are now trying to climb.

Little did I know the people I would be asking questions of at press conferences five years ago covering bank results would be in the dock in the criminal courts facing questions of a far different kind.

In journalism, being in the right place at the right time is everything and becoming banking correspondent for a daily newspaper within days of queues forming at Northern Rock branches in Britain and Ireland meant luck played a big part in the timing of my decision to choose that role.

The banking crisis dragged financial news from well inside the newspaper on to the front pages most days and pushed the most technical minutiae of the workings of banking up the television and news bulletins for consumption by the masses.

Writing about the likes of credit default swaps for financially literate readers was one thing but explaining complex matters of banking to lay readers meant understanding it first (obviously) and writing about it clearly and in a way that you would not lose the reader by the third paragraph.

When a taxi driver launches into a diatribe about why subordinated bondholders shouldn’t get their money back, you know you have to stay on top of things.

It’s the little things that make you realise, in a crisis, that it’s not just financial anoraks reading your articles. I was in a late bar a few years back when two not-unattractive young women approached me. One asked how I thought Nama would work. I would be taking irresponsible journalistic licence if I said that approaches from such women in such circumstances were a regular occurrence.

Neither do you expect certain reactions during a crisis. One very wet morning, there was nothing but an Anglo Irish Bank umbrella (given to me as a joke) to grab at home as I rushed out to make a meeting. I started getting paranoid as taxi after taxi passed me by. I became even more paranoid later in the day when a cab ploughed into a puddle and drenched me. I understood then why a banker once wrote anonymously in this newspaper that he preferred to get wet rather than humiliated by carrying an Anglo umbrella.

The crisis also drew you into people’s lives. I was asked to meet a nervous millionaire pensioner in a sleepy bar in Connemara about a large sum of money he had on deposit in Anglo. He was being offered an even higher rate of interest by Anglo if he put all his money on deposit with it. This was weeks before the bank guarantee and he knew something was up.

A crack-of-dawn phone call one morning in September 2008 from a researcher for Newstalk radio about a bank guarantee the Government had decided to introduce overnight turned out to be the start of a frenetic four years of trying to keep up.

That day stands out as the most memorable of the crisis; the egg-throwing at an AIB shareholder meeting is a close second.

The ramifications of the decision to tie the State to the banks remind me of that famous (and perhaps misinterpreted) quote of a Chinese politician in the 1970s when asked about the effect of the French Revolution. “Too early to say,” he said.

It may be too strong a parallel to draw but there is a sense that the Government’s decision, its long-term consequences and how it might dictate the future behaviour of Irish bankers, will be chewed over for many years given the dangerous course on which it set the State.

A comment the then minister for finance, Brian Lenihan, made at that dramatic press conference on September 30th, 2008, unveiling the guarantee stands out. I asked him how the State could afford to cover a €400 billion guarantee when it was 10 times the national debt. “We have to have faith in ourselves as a nation and a people that we are capable of having a viable banking system,” he replied. “Faith” was an interesting choice. Credo, meaning “belief”, is the Latin root of the word “credit”, the cornerstone of banking. Within two years, the credibility of the banks was long gone and the government’s was ebbing away fast. Again, it was about keeping up to speed with rapidly changing events. It has been both exhilarating and exhausting, but always fascinating.

The Chinese proverb “May you live in interesting times” is sometimes referred to as a curse. For me, it isn’t.