Drumm too dull to understand what he was part of and too thick to feel pain of others’ suffering

Literary reputations are fragile things, but David Drumm's place in the annals of Irish fiction seems secure. The €7.2 billion in phoney deposits with which he inflated the accounts of Anglo Irish Bank a decade ago is invention on an epic scale.

It did what the most ambitious novelists do. It created a parallel universe that had the feel of reality, a storybook world of success stories for investors, shareholders and regulators. It was a carnival merry-go-round of funny money made to look like a golden carriage drawn by thoroughbreds. The sheer scale and effrontery of the illusion are undeniably impressive.

Yet while Drumm holds his own as one of the great weavers of Irish fictions, he would not himself make a particularly good fictional character. He has, on the surface, all the right ingredients to be a properly tragic figure. In the classic dramas, the fate of the protagonist is not just his own – it sucks in his or her entire society. This is certainly the case with Drumm: like Oedipus or Lear he pulled his whole world down with him.

Wrecked lives

His suffering has been multiplied over and over in hundreds of thousands of Irish households. In his wake, as he went to Mountjoy jail this week, he left wrecked lives, broken families, an embittered country. It is often said of great figures, when they go, that they left the nation in their debt – in Drumm’s case he left the nation with his debts, forcing his compatriots to suck up €29 billion worth of the toxic sludge.

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Drumm’s story also has the classic tragic shape: rise and fall, rags to riches to rags again, hubris to nemesis. He came from outside the charmed circle of private schools, inherited money and family connections. He was a Christian Brothers boy, not a Jesuit alumnus, the son of a truck driver and a hairdresser.

It was always going to end in the manufacturing of phony accounts

When Sean FitzPatrick, the effective creator of Anglo Irish, was stepping down as chief executive in 2004, Drumm was referred to in speculative reports on the succession stakes as the “dark horse” candidate, young and virtually unknown. A few months later, having got the top job at the age of 37, he was one of the rising stars of an Ireland that itself seemed to be the rising star of the global economy.

In January 2005, The Irish Times marked the new year with a feature on the "people to watch" in Irish life. In hindsight, the list wears quite well, including as it did Ruth Negga (now an international movie star), Stuart Carolan (who would go on to write the TV series Love/Hate), the young economist Philip Lane (now head of the Central Bank) and the soprano Ailish Tynan, (now a fixture at international opera houses).

Hindsight

Last on the list was "David Drumm, banker". In his case, hindsight might suggest that he was not watched closely enough. No one else on the list can quite match his distinction of a criminal conviction, a heavy jail sentence and almost universal public revulsion.

But this ought to make him tragic – the rising star that turned out to be a shooting star, not ascending into the firmament but burning out in less than three years and falling into the darkness of criminality.

It is quite the dramatic arc: from obscurity to master of the universe to a permanent place in history as the captain of the most disaster-prone Irish ship since the Titanic – a captain, moreover, who did not go down nobly with the ship but scuttled off to an American lifeboat, leaving the passengers to their fate.

Yet, for all that he seems to have the right credentials, Drumm feels more icky than Icarus. He is too small, too trite, to bear the weight of tragic meaning. He is not much of a metaphorical animal, neither an adequate embodiment of the Celtic Tiger nor a suitable scapegoat for the collective sins that led to its demise.

He is just a hyped-up chartered accountant who came to believe, like so many others in the distorted culture of finance capitalism, that when numbers have enough zeros on the end of them they have zero real-life meaning. They are so easily manipulated that they might as well, like that fateful €7.2 billion, not exist at all.

Somebody else

Two things make Drumm so much smaller than a figure at the heart of such profoundly consequential events ought to be. One is the sense that if it had not been him it would have been somebody else.

Would it have mattered much if the 37-year-old dark horse didn’t get the Anglo job in 2004? Almost certainly not. For if it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a State to create and sustain a fraudulent bank.

It takes political support at the highest levels of government, where the desire to believe in the great success story becomes an insistence that to believe otherwise is heresy. It takes a regulatory system that is not just pathetically weak but that is, as Ireland’s banking regulator most certainly was, designed to be so.

It takes a public discourse in which a casino bank such as Anglo could be seen as a paragon of prudence. (The Irish Times report on Drumm's elevation in September 2004 ends with the line that Anglo is "admired for its conservative provisioning and good cost control".)

This make-believe world was itself fundamentally fraudulent in its ability to create spectacular short-term profits from utterly unsustainable lending practices. It was always going to end in the manufacturing of phoney accounts. The bank was a factory of fake news. In February 2007, when the slide towards disaster was already inevitable, the headline over The Irish Times report of Anglo's agm reads: "Anglo expects growth story to continue through financial year."

Ecstasy

As late as November 2007, Anglo reported triumphantly that its pre-tax profit had broken through the €1 billion barrier, news greeted with ecstasy on the Dublin stock exchange where its shares rose by 10 per cent.

Drumm’s cliches about a “resilient funding platform” and “excellent liquidity and capital strength” immediately added more than €3 billion to the value of Irish-listed shares in a single day. This was funny money too, a currency backed by nothing more than the desire to believe that everything was going to be alright.

When so many people are buying bulls**t, somebody is going to sell it – and it’s not going to be a hard sell. Drumm didn’t need to be a mesmerising illusionist, a compelling Svengali – and he wasn’t. He was just a boring little man inflated by other people’s desperate need to believe in the reality of his magic money, a Wizard of Oz without the original’s talent for showmanship.

The other thing Drumm lacks for the role of tragic protagonist is self-awareness. In real tragedies the heroes come to a moment of recognition, when they realise the truth about themselves.

We need the f**king loans because we're running out of money…

Drumm has never given the slightest indication that he recognises anything. No remorse, no shame, no insight – nothing. When things fell apart, he ran away, and away he would have stayed if had not been pursued through a long and difficult extradition process. In court, as he was about to be sentenced, his lawyer made it clear that he could not apologise for his crimes because he did not believe he had committed any.

And in his case, this seems entirely believable. Listening to the infamous Anglo tapes, we hear him complaining that the bank has been “f**ked up the arse by the market” and that the minister for finance “made a balls of it. He killed us.”

Own fault

We never hear him expressing the thought that what is happening is his own fault. We hear the astonishing arrogance of his demands that the Irish people, though the Central Bank, be instructed to bail him out: “We need the f**king loans because we’re running out of money… We need the moolah, you have it, so you’re going to give it to us and when would that be?”

We do not hear the slightest hesitation, the merest moment of reflection on what this might mean for his compatriots.

It is easy to believe that he is, in a sense, quite sincere, that he sits in his cell and ponders the cruel injustice of his fate. He is a victim of the market, of the government, of the regulator, of the people of Ireland who didn’t give him enough of their moolah quickly enough to stuff into the gaping holes below the waterline of his sinking ship.

For all his cleverness, there is something deeply stupid about this. He is too dull to understand what he was part of, too thick to feel the pain of other people’s suffering. There is too much of that suffering still going on for Drumm to be comic. But he is too banal for tragedy. All his story tells us in the end is that the waters in which we drowned were very shallow indeed.