Bankers are brought to book by Four Angry Men
Thursday November 05 2009
Business writer, commentator, senator and chronicler of our boom to bust Shane Ross last night answered a question he is often asked: why is he so angry?
He revealed last night that it was because "the banks are too powerful to be punished".
Over 1,000 people turned out to listen to 'Four Angry Men' last night as he was joined by three equally enraged authors.
The c commentators on economics and politics -- Matt Cooper, Pat Leahy, Fintan O'Toole and Shane Ross -- discussed their new books and examined the current economic crisis.
They also spoke about how the country arrived at this point and where we should go from here as they debated the state of the nation at the National Concert Hall in Dublin last night.
In his book, 'The Bankers: How the Banks Brought Ireland to its Knees', journalist of the year 2009 Mr Ross makes sense of a scandal -- a collusion between banks, regulators and the Government -- that will haunt Ireland for years.
Mr Ross said that "the latest banking crisis happened before ... in 1984" and should have been a "warning sign".
He said that back in the 1970s and 1980s "they did allow very small banks to go bust", adding "there was never any penalty paid by an individual for the great overcharging scandal".
He said we had been "living in a world when banks moved very very freely indeed".
"The reason being we had big banks, a small country. Small businesses were certainly very susceptible to the will of the banks in a period where there was no competition of any real sort," he said.
Mr Ross questioned who belonged to the 'Golden Circle', "which the banks had created, which ran and dominated the political landscape for so long during the period of the boom".
An independent member of Seanad Eireann, Mr Ross is also Business Editor of the 'Sunday Independent'. 'The Bankers' has already shot to number two in the bestseller list.
Today FM's Matt Cooper ('Who Really Runs Ireland'), the Sunday Business Post's Pat Leahy ('Showtime: The Inside Story of Fianna Fail in Power') and Irish Times columnist Fintan O'Toole ('Ships of Fools') also spoke at the debate.
- Denise Clarke
Irish Independent
