Peter Mathews (Dublin South, Independent) | Oireachtas source

It does not matter because our bond yields are cheap and the focus now is on getting people to spend more money, as well as getting property prices to rise again.

When Wilbur Ross, Fairfax and Kennedy Wilson came to these shores, the type of green that filled their hearts was not the shamrock we will all be proudly wearing in a few days' time. It was the green with George Washington's face, the dollar. Does anyone believe that Wilbur Ross or Kennedy Wilson give a damn about this country or its economic recovery? These are not Chuck Feeney philanthropists but cold, hard, calculating capitalists in search of high yields, high returns and high risk. However, they did not even take a high risk with their Bank of Ireland undertakings, as the Government basically presented them with candy floss. They took a gamble on Ireland and have tripled - in some cases quadrupled - their money on the country. They took this gamble because at every step of the way the Government reduced their risk and gave them sweetheart deals to cement their investments.

A gargantuan area of economic life that, until very recently with the sale of Irish Nationwide residential mortgages, has been completely ignored is the sale of bank loans from Bank of Ireland, AIB, NAMA, Permanent TSB and Anglo Irish Bank, not to mention the other non-domestic banks such as Bank of Scotland Ireland and Ulster Bank. The loan sales that have been undertaken in this country and the transfer of wealth from domestic Irish owners to foreign vulture capitalists have been of the magnitude of two thirds of the entire economy. We spent weeks in this House debating the sale of State assets such as the ESB, the national lottery and Coillte. These asset sales collectively amount to a small fraction of the State-owned bank assets the Government has sold at enormous discounts and losses to the taxpayer who owns these banks. The Wilbur Ross fairy tale is a central component of these sales which has all but been ignored by this House and the media alike.

In the summer of 2011, Kennedy Wilson bought a business from Bank of Ireland that was responsible for managing borrowers’ property loans, much of which were UK commercial property loans. One month later this same company was part of the private consortium that bought shares in Bank of Ireland. This private investment was fronted by Wilbur Ross and was widely regarded at the time as a sign that investor confidence was returning to Ireland and our banking system. Behind the scenes, however, there was a much bigger play being fronted by Kennedy Wilson which concerned the main part of its own business, which is buying up bank loans. A few months after the Bank of Ireland private consortium investment, Kennedy Wilson bought €1.3 billion of UK commercial property loans from the same bank in what Ernst & Young later described as the single largest European commercial property loan sale in 2011. When the Government sold its State assets, it appointed an independent broker to sell the lottery and Bord Gáis businesses. Why were the bankers allowed do sweetheart deals with impunity? There was no open, transparent market process for these loan sales.

This is in spite of the fact that Bank of Ireland was in receipt of almost €5 billion of taxpayers' money and subject to European Commission state aid rules. Since the sale of those loans to Kennedy Wilson, the former head of the non-core division for Bank of Ireland - the division which was responsible for selling the loans - was appointed managing director of Kennedy Wilson. The head of the unit in the Department of Finance responsible for overseeing the private investment into Bank of Ireland and the bank's loan sales left at the beginning of 2013 and was given a job as head of group treasury in Bank of Ireland. Both Wilbur Ross and Fairfax are either co-investors, or direct investors in Kennedy Wilson in a vulture triumvirate that has made billions of euro from the carcass of the Irish banking system. These profits were facilitated by weak politicians looking for a quick win and what appear to be civil servants and bankers looking for a new job.

Is it any wonder that Wilbur Ross, Fairfax, Prem Watsa and Kennedy Wilson regularly hail Richie Boucher as a hero of the Irish banking system when he has been instrumental in making these investors billions of euro in profit? This vulture triumvirate has made billions of euro from the collapse of the domestic financial system, which was overseen and led by the same man they now herald as their financial hero. There is no question that the profits these people have made are the stuff of Wall Street legend; "heroic" is a good a description. However, I find it hard to believe that when the cameras are off and the journalists have gone home, Wilbur Ross, Fairfax and Kennedy Wilson think of Richie Boucher and the Government as anything other than amateurs in a game in which the big boys always win.

The same neoliberal or establishment philosophy exists in Europe where the boys in Frankfurt have scant regard for bullying a country that represents just 1% of the entire eurozone into bailing out unguaranteed, unsecured senior bondholders. Three years after bullying one tiny nation's taxpayers into bailing out bank bondholders, the ECB imposed the exact same financial bullying tactics on Cyprus to make ordinary depositors and taxpayers pay the price for the lending mistakes of their banks. For the educated financiers in Frankfurt, sovereign countries such as Ireland or Cyprus, rich in history, culture and independent spirit, represent a dot in the financial ocean that is the eurozone. They are an irrelevant distraction whose peoples can be squeezed for every euro they earn to preserve the integrity of the eurozone financial system and, as they see it, the greater common good.

In the summer of 2012 when Spain and Italy faced the financial abyss that Ireland faced, Frankfurt did not tell them to get in line or that a bomb would go off in Madrid or Milan if they did not. The ECB board members panicked. They saw their own personal credibility on the line and they saw the financial implosion of the euro system as their legacy. Instead of threatening proverbial bombs like our Minister faced, Spain, Italy and the entire eurozone economy was given the Draghi pledge, which has fundamentally altered the eurozone crisis. The ECB will buy whatever it takes. Ireland could have done with the Draghi pledge four years ago when we piled €64 billion of taxpayers' money into a financial drain of bondholders, bankers and pension funds across the world.

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