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THE two big reports on Irish banks released yesterday will do nothing to ease the Government's political difficulties and will probably fuel fresh public anger and unease.
The serpentine catalogue of events that has marked the decline of the bank hailed by Ulick McEvaddy as "one of the greats" is worth looking at. It is possible that the realities may be blurred in people's minds by a steady drip of denial, obfuscation, contradiction and, at times, downright lies.
No wonder the Anglo Irish chairman felt obliged to acknowledge the hurt, outrage and disappointment being felt towards his bank.
Events have unfolded on two levels. Some, such as the property collapse and job losses, have been all too apparent. Others, such as bank directors' loan machinations and the secret propping up of Anglo Irish with back-to-back loans, were kept hidden from the public gaze. Even today, with the publication of the Anglo Irish Bank annual report and the PricewaterhouseCoopers investigation, we are finding out things that we were probably never meant to know. The heavily censored PwC document is itself evidence that a great deal of information is still being withheld.
Last May, Anglo Irish Bank chief executive David Drumm told his shareholders that the bank was in a robust funding position.
By September, crisis was in the air as Anglo Irish lost €4bn in days and the Government announced its €400bn guarantee of all six Irish banks.
In December, Mr Drumm again told the world that Anglo Irish Bank was performing strongly but, two weeks later, Sean FitzPatrick resigned as chairman when shareholders found out about his €87m in hidden loans. He was followed the next day by Mr Drumm.
Following the Government's decision to nationalise Anglo Irish Bank, it was revealed that a 'golden circle' had secretly taken 10pc of Anglo Irish. The Financial Regulator resigned.
In the past two weeks, we have learned of the €7bn dealings with Irish Life and Permanent, which both banks still insist were legitimate, despite IL&P's chief executive having resigned on the insistence of the Minister for Finance. The whole sorry saga has exposed the banking regulatory system as a shambles and raised questions about the auditing process. Anglo Irish Bank's auditors, Ernst & Young, have refused to answer questions about how they failed to report on the loans taken out by Sean FitzPatrick over an eight-year period.
People are contemptuous of such evasion and disgusted by the huge remuneration levels indulged by institutions that have let us all down and saddled us with huge losses which will have to be paid off by generations of taxpayers yet to come. Yesterday's skirmish outside the Labour Court, where the Construction Industry Federation was making its case for a 10pc pay-cut for 190,000 building workers, was evidence of a growing polarisation.
The anger of a group of construction workers who have lost their jobs is understandable, but it is nothing compared to the groundswell of revulsion at the rewards reaped by the likes of the directors of Anglo Irish Bank, as revealed in the annual report.
The bank paid a total of €11.5m to directors in the year to the end of September, including a €3.75m payment to Tom Browne, who retired in November 2007, "in recognition of his contribution to the group". Then there were the loans of €179m to directors, not counting former chairman Sean FitzPatrick's commuter loan of €83.3m.
What the bank's annual report tells us is that directors were casually paying each other massive amounts on foot of a property bubble which had already burst and which would soon contribute to recession and huge job losses.
Despite the Minister for Finance's optimistic declaration that yesterday's limited revelations about the banks mark a new beginning, the story is far from over.
The admission by the Anglo Irish chairman that "disclosures" have made it more difficult to raise finance, other than from the Government, suggests that taxpayers may have to pay even more dearly for our secondhand bank than we thought. Meanwhile, the gaps in the PricewaterhouseCooper report speak volumes.
