Remember the famous iodine tablets sent to every household for use in a nuclear emergency?
The Government may have to do something similar again.
Because if the opening day of the banking inquiry’s new module is anything to go by, there’s going to be a nationwide run on blood pressure tablets very soon.
Just when you thought you couldn’t be any more annoyed by the carry-on during the banking crisis and property crash, along come two witnesses from Nama to shove everyone up to boiling point again.
This is the "Nexus phase" of the Oireachtas investigation, which is a posh way of saying that they've reached the nitty-gritty stage.
What Frank Daly and Brendan McDonagh had to say about events leading up to and including the night of the bank guarantee was as frightening as it was infuriating.
McDonagh, who was a senior executive with the National Treasury Management Agency during the banking crisis, became the first person to give an account of what actually happened in Government Buildings during the late-night meeting that resulted in the guarantee.
Not that he could tell us very much.
In an astonishing revelation, he explained he was summoned to Merrion Street by the secretary general of the Department of Finance, who refused to tell him why. Then this international banking expert was shoved into a side room with three other people and ignored for four hours while the then taoiseach, minister for finance and sundry senior civil servants agonised over what to do.
Brendan McDonagh knows his onions when it comes to the money business. But for some inexplicable reason, on the brink of such a monumental decision, nobody on the government side thought to ask for his opinion.
Input
As a senior representative of the NTMA – “the nation’s banker” as inquiry chairman Ciarán Lynch put it – his input could have been useful.
“At 1am, we were told the government had decided to guarantee the banks,” he stated, as jaws clattered to the floor around him.
He had no idea that this had been on the cards. His little group could see through to another room where there were a lot of comings and goings, so they figured out that something was afoot.
But they hadn’t a clue what it might be.
And what was Brendan’s reaction when he was told the news?
“I was just a bit surprised.”
Not surprisingly.
McDonagh’s matter-of-fact account of his strange night in Government Buildings made the whole episode seem all the more incredible.
He drew a compelling picture. These four men stuck in a room while all hell was breaking loose next door.
His “abiding memory” was of a small portable telly in the corner, stuck on an American business channel and scrolling the continuous message that the Dow Jones index was down 700 points. It was “tanking” before his eyes.
"We could see the world was collapsing – not just Ireland. "
And suddenly, though we weren’t there, it became our abiding memory of the night of the bank guarantee.
Both witnesses – Frank Daly is a former head of the Revenue Commissioners – turned out to be very skilled in the use of the measured phrase, giving Lynch’s committee a masterclass in the art of understatement.
Daly, despite the best efforts of Joe Higgins to have him agree that the banks were "reckless" in the run-up the collapse, said they "displayed an attitude to lending which wasn't rigorous".
But while the Nama chairman was “not going to take a view,” his descriptions of the banks’ unbelievably irresponsible approach to lending at the height of the boom left no doubt as to where that view rests.
Higgins tried again with McDonagh. Did the outrageous amounts lent out by the banks to people with little collateral but who were big noises in the property development business not amount “to a damning indictment” of them?
The best he could get out of the Nama chief executive was that there was “a highly unusual level of lending to a small group of individuals.”
But from the likes of McDonagh, “highly unusual” – a phrase he repeated a number of times, is as near as you’ll get to a damning indictment.
Madness
Daly spoke of the madness that surrounded the property market. There were people who were builders buying hotels and people who weren’t builders building housing developments.
It was nuts.
Then after the first layer – the builders, came “the new arrivals. A lot of the professional class”.
They hadn’t a clue. But “they were involved in golf club chat: if you’re not into property, you’re not in the game at all”.
And the banks flung money at them too.
McDonagh and Daly knew the system was going haywire. McDonagh took the NTMA’s deposits out of the Irish banks.
But the bankers kept going. It was a “herd instinct,” said Daly. Which is no excuse.
We can still see them now, strolling into the committee room in their expensive suits with their advisers and PR people in tow. Talking down to the TDs. Lying about their fundamentals being “sound”.
The cheek of the lot of them.
Idiots. Who cost us dearly.
As for those new arrivals – they were the flashiest ones in the Galway Tent. The "proper" builders tended to be a bit more low key.
They were show-offs. Expensively tanned and dressed, keen for everyone to know about their latest deal. Their champagne. Their helicopters. Their latest hotel.
Throwing the cash around. Delighted with themselves. Yet pathetically eager to have their names mentioned in the social diaries.
Nearly all of them headed straight for the tender embrace of Nama.
While frantically trying to stick somebody else with their bills.
Now, where are those blood pressure pills again?
