THE economist Paul Krugman was complaining the other day about “bad metaphors”, specifically, about the frequency with which it is claimed that a controversial US tax cut will help “jump-start” the economy, or “give a fragile recovery time to strengthen”.
America’s problems are much deeper than comparisons with a broken-down car or a patient needing rest would imply, he protested, “And bad metaphors make for bad policy”. I had a similar thought last weekend when hearing the Irish Bank Officials Association defend its members over the AIB bonus row. A spokesman was pointing out that the counter staff suffering verbal abuse about the issue were not, in general, the ones getting bonuses. Fair enough. But then he added that, while he could understand the anger, “it should not be vented at people who are at the coal-face working with customers”.
No doubt we’re all more touchy than we used to be about this sort of thing. But really, I thought, if bank staff are coal-miners, what does that make us? “Carbonised vegetable matter found in strata below the earth’s surface”, according to my dictionary. And maybe the insult is justified, given Irish bank customers’ notorious inertia and reluctance ever to switch accounts. But the most insensitive thing about the coal comparison was the implication that, as a result of the banks’ activities, we will all get burned eventually. Which would be funny if it wasn’t true.
It’s tempting now to take the IBOA analogy further and portray AIB’s enforced U-turn this week as a kind-of tunnel collapse, cutting off 2,500 miners from their bonuses. But that might only encourage a successful rescue attempt. And besides, however apt it may be to characterise banks’ relations with ordinary customers, the coal-face metaphor breaks down in their dealings with big business and the bond-markets. Bond-holders in particular have proven entirely flame-resistant thus far.
So whichever mining substance we can compare them to, it’s hardly coal.
SPEAKING of the IBOA, why are bank officials called “officials”, anyway? Yes, they work in offices. But so, for example, do journalists, and yet nobody has ever referred to someone as a “media official” (except, back in the early 1970s, if he was also a Marxist republican). Why, then, do bankers enjoy this aura of public office, which is what the term implies? It’s true that, currently, Irish banks are more official than at any time in their history. And ironically, some are struggling to adapt to this reality. That bonus row suggests a power-struggle between AIB’s official and provisional wings, perhaps even hinting at the emergence of a new Continuity faction, dedicated to opposing the State occupation and to pursuing bonuses by whatever means possible.
I suppose the term “bank official” comes from the same mentality as “bank holiday”; although at least the latter has some historic justification. Our modern tradition of statutory holidays began with the Bank Holiday Act of 1870, which decreed that banks would close on four special days: Easter Monday, Whit Monday, the first Monday in August, and December 26th.
The madness quickly spread. Soon the stockbrokers and other commercial houses were at it too. Then the contagion infected the general populace. And such was the welcome for the new holidays that the politician responsible, Sir John Lubbock, was jocularly canonised by a grateful public.
For a time, each of the dates was known as a “St Lubbock’s Day”. Which indeed was the headline of a commentary piece in The Irish Times, on the first Monday of August 1873. With the generosity characteristic of his calling (undiminished by the fact that, then as now, journalists had to work all such Mondays), the writer waxed poetic in his praise: “The ‘short and simple annals’ of the toiler are lighted up by holidays as dark worlds are lighted up by bonfires at times of national rejoicing. The dull monotony of work is as surely broken in by the rejoicings of festivities as the dark heavens are invaded by comets that spread fire over the black concave or as the dulness of November is irradiated by arrowy meteors or flashing auroras that flit ere we can point their place . . .”
Sad to say, despite such eulogies, poor Lubbock was soon forgotten. And as the holidays multiplied, it was the banks that, nominally at least, got all the credit for irradiating us. A situation that continues incongruously today, when a new form of radiation – some of those loans are so toxic they have a half-life – leaks out of them, poisoning us all.
Surely now, their State ownership notwithstanding, it’s past time to drop the “official” from “bank official” (who really wants to be known as a “BO” for short anyway?). And while we’re at it, to find a new way of describing bank holidays. Or even an old one.
My suggestion is that we go back to calling them what they were before 1870: “red letter days”. They used to be so-named because that was how they were printed on calendars. But the red would be doubly apt now. Not only would it describe the colour of the State’s finances for the foreseeable future, thanks to reckless lending. It would also serve as a coded reference to the banks’ forced nationalisation; something that, incidentally, those media officials of the 1970s could only dream about.