Mr. David McWilliams:

Yes, it seemed a good chapter heading. What I was trying to explain, which had not really been explained before and certainly had not been explained to the Irish people by the policy makers, was that once one joins a monetary union, what one is effectively doing, if there is no regulation of one's banks, is getting the PIN number to the ATM card of the richest person in the room. Of course, the richest person in the EU's room was Germany. It was rich and it was in decline. After reunification in the early 1990s, the united country swallowed up the former East Germany and it cost it a fortune to do so. Germany's economy then began to stagger under the weight of those repayments and as a result of the cultural and demographic shift. The country started to go into decline in the period from 1995 to 2005. For Ireland, this meant our interest rates, which were really set for the Germans, went to levels that were totally inappropriate for the boom we were having. It meant that the normal way in which one warns people that things are out of kilter, which is by setting higher interest rates, not only did not happen but we actually got lower interest rates.

I was trying to explain in the book where the money was coming from. I remember going to pubs and people asking, "Where is all this bloody money coming from?". I recall a builder friend of mine who worked with me years ago in Boston saying to me that the difference in Ireland at that time, compared with the past, was there was now no problem getting money. For the 2005 book, I invented a German character whom I named Udo Lindenberg after a German crooner. This guy was sort of the German version of France's Johnny Hallyday - not a great gig to attend, I suspect. I invented the character and named him for this singer I had heard of. Udo represented the old, parsimonious German saver. Banks hate savings because they do not make any money on them. In fact, they pay out for savings. In that situation, they asked themselves who they could give them to in order to make money on Udo's savings, and over here was Ireland.