When I was fearfully facing life outside politics, adding up my liabilities and setting against them whatever I could drum up in the way of potential assets, a friend indicated that he thought I was worrying too much.
"But look at this," I said, pointing to my bank debt.
"Yeah," he said approvingly, "it's good and solid. That's the way to have the bank. The bigger the amount you owe them, the more they're in your power. If you owe them a small amount, they'll dance on you, foreclose on you, bankrupt you. But get in debt to a huge amount and they'll preserve you like Tutankhamen. They can't afford for you to go down, so they'll agree to the most amazing deals."
I'm sure he's right, although I didn't actually test the theory out.
It has struck me since the AIB bogus accounts scandal broke that the banks have cleverly passed on this approach to the Revenue Commissioners. The Revenue will go after you if you're a tiddler, but if you're a big banking fish, they do a deal. Only they don't call it a deal; or even an agreement; or put it in writing. As that master of corporate definition, Mr Michael Lowry, would put it: "There's golden circles for you."
When Jim Mitchell and the Public Accounts Committee (or PACman & Co) went after AIB, it was perhaps the best thing that had happened to the image of politicians in years. PACman, and a couple of his Co, did some nifty questioning and flushed out a conflict of interpretation as big as a barn door. It was thus, with dismay, one learned about the committee seeking extra powers. Not that one would want them to be disempowered. One would just wish that they'd get on with it.
A controversy gone off the boil tends to curdle, and there will be a sense of gratuitous reheating if a few months elapse before the committee can get down to serious business again.
I have great faith in Mr Mitchell's judgment, so if he says his committee needs extra powers, his committee probably needs extra powers. It just seems a pity that areas within what has already been said could not be queried just a little more.
There was, for example, the threatening stance adopted by the AIB man when he warned PACman & Co (and, by extension, the rest of us pesky natives) that interfering with the banking system would be done at our peril. Sort of "if you pick it, it will never heal".
Except that he went further. Muck around with the banking system, he suggested, and the Celtic Tiger could turn into a Celtic Pussycat very quickly.
Now correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't remember - despite being there at the time - that when the Celtic Tiger was being bred the banking system was in there with a major contribution to the process. It seems to me a Co Sligo man named MacSharry had a lot to do with it, and that it was mainly the politicians who bore the brunt of it.
Retrospectively, and by implication, taking credit for the Celtic Tiger is bad enough. Threatening to take our toys and go home if we don't let them rewrite the rules is worse. One would not wish to be at the mercy of this kind of thinking for very long.
There is, perhaps, a case that top bankers should have to be reelected every few years. It might keep them more in touch with reality.
The other area I'd like to see explored is a new variation on character assassination - personality assassination. We've seen it at work earlier this year in relation to the insurance ombudsman. Now we see it in use against one of AIB's former employees.
I don't know AIB's former internal auditor personally. For all I know, he may be convinced that Stalin was his granny and that Italy is filled with fields of waving macaroni. AIB's top brass has certainly portrayed him as having personality and judgment flaws: nice fella, pity about the conscience.
If PACman & Co were to have a further engagement with the top brass, I would love them to ask why it took the bank 10 years to notice these flaws. How did this man function in the demanding and unpopular role of internal auditor if he was the kind of guy who would get worked up by top-of-the-head figures dreamed up by another senior employee, apparently to get a rise out of him?
And does not Mr Tom Mulcahy have a reservation about his recruitment and promotion systems if his top tax guy is playing with his top audit guy on company time?
The problem with personality assassination is that it's like mocking your mother for being such a bossy bore, warning you against smoking, drinking, driving too fast and failing to do your homework. There is satisfaction in the mockery but at least some of what she has warned you about is still valid.
Within AIB, an internal auditor fulfils the "fussy mother" role and the man in question seems to have done it sufficiently well to irritate some of those around him. Except that a fair few of the chickens against which he warned are coming home to roost.
AIB has a much larger tax bill than it paid. AIB does not have the unanimity of view with the Revenue Commissioners on which it congratulated itself.
What is most sinister in all of this saga is the assumption, on the bank's part, that the banking system has some innate privilege which sets it beyond examination and the matching apathetic assumption outside financial circles that nothing real will ever be done to teach them manners - a fine will simply come out of shareholders' and customers' pockets and management will not suffer.
My friend Alan Dukes maintains that a distinguishing precursor of every 20th century recession is a loss, immediately beforehand, of public faith in the banking system. We certainly have that loss of faith.
We must hope the other side of the equation doesn't come into being.