Dan White: That smug, Shameless seanie makes me sick to the stomach
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Tuesday December 22 2009
Have you ever felt your blood boil? I know mine did last night. And I suspect that I wasn't alone.
Up and down the country hundreds of thousands of viewers, many of whom have lost their jobs and homes, will have been appalled at the regulatory failures that allowed a cabal of cowboys to hijack the banking system and beggar the rest of us for a generation.
While there was little in the programme that full-time bank junkies like myself didn't already know or at least suspect, what it did do brilliantly was to distil that combination of regulatory incompetence and banking arrogance that has brought this country's economy to the brink of destruction.
With every day that passes that sleek, perma-tanned smoothie Sean 'Seanie' FitzPatrick is becoming more and more the poster-boy for the excesses of the Irish banking system.
The sight of him smugly seeking to defend the indefensible in earlier TV interviews, combined with him refusing to answer reporter Oonagh Smyth's questions when she doorstepped him, simultaneously infuriated and nauseated me.
I suspect that I wasn't alone.
FitzPatrick, who was forced to quit as Anglo chairman a year ago when huge concealed loans to him from his bank were discovered, is now not even paying the interest on the more than €80m he owes his former employer.
At least former Irish Nationwide boss Michael Fingleton, who 'retired' from the building society last April with a €1m 'bonus' and a €27.6m pension top-up, had the wit to stay incognito while the programme was being made.
Brian Cowen still seems determined to ignore calls for an investigation into the banking crisis. If last night's programme makes other viewers even half as mad as it made me, then I suspect that Cowen won't be able to refuse demands for an investigation for much longer.
- Dan White
