Running of the Irish Developers
Shortly before April Fool’s Day, somewhere between Marbella and Pamplona rumours surfaced of a fresh sighting of another one of Mother Erin’s formerly fattest and fastest of money-throwing cats trying the disappearing act, tail between his now skin-skin-skinny legs, dragging a tiny travois of frittering gold dust like some Shah on the run. A dogged reporter tried a mobile phone number on his list from the glory days of the boom.
“Would you be Sean Fitzpatrick?” he probed, hoping to I.D. one of a growing list of Irish property developers under duress who have absconded to points far with whatever they can carry while leaving the country bankrupt behind them. They are the Children of Lir disappearing into caves.
“Possibly,” said a quaking voice.
Interpol has reportedly been searching for the whereabouts of Fitzpatrick but evidently forgot to try his number. Then again several of of the dodgiest Irish developers have been running in the general direction of Pamplona lately — including one fellow last year who left only a case of claret for the Gardai in his furniture-free south Dublin palace before he absconded with his mountains of debt. Another just shot himself.
“Possibly,” was a word Fitzpatrick had never used when he and his fellow fast-talking developers littered the countryside with tens of thousands of unneeded cookie-cutter houses and ruined the beauty of as many seaside villages as they could. The ruling Fianna Fail party, revelling in developers’ campaign contributions, refused to restrain them. To the contrary, they egged the Irish Buildorama on with insane tax incentives to build, build, build without a thought for the consequences for an economy in which 25% of the workforce depended on construction riches to sustain them.
Next the Irish builder boyos bought up half of London, and huge chunks of Budapest, the Algarve, Tenerife, whatever caught their eyes, and a house of cards grew taller and taller and taller, each new level financed by credit obtained from the purported market value of the level below. For downpayment cash, all they had to do was wine and dine the clubby, instant credit dispensers of the private Anglo Irish Bank, the high temple of easy money during the Irish boom. The place’s headquarters had a particular drawer that was rumoured to be bottomless. But then, the Irish bristle with furore and furor too if anybody says they still believe in fairy tales, such as pots of golds lurking beneath every momentary light in the sky.
Then came the Lehman Brothers debacle and the first shuddering fault lines of the global economic collapse, which the likes of Fitzpatrick and the cronies of Fianna Fail tried to say couldn’t, just wouldn’t hit Ireland too awfully hard. But yon Sean and nine other friends called “the Golden Circle” ultimately got worried about the solvency of their Anglo Irish Bank Mother Lode of eternal credit, so came up with a clever fix. They’d determine the value of Anglo Irish all by themselves and the hairs of they skinny, skin chins and finance the purchase on NOTHING but loans to themselves, since they were such nice friends of the bank, or club, or confraternity, or whatever it might have been.
April is the Cruelest Month
“A giant sucking sound” is what the weirdly chicken-faced American financier and quacky presidential candidate Ross Perot predicted the U.S would hear after too much idiot economics drove its future down the drain.
And the other April Fool’s news has also hit. It was that, by the way, bailing out the atonishing, furiously papered-over, and still not fully plumbed collapse of the Irish economy and more or less the future of every student for years to come would require every single taxpayer in the land to make ten Novenas and to cough up, oh, perhaps 22,000 euros — $35,000– for starters, per person, principally to bail out the House of Cards that was and is and forever shall be more, Anglo Irish Bank, avatar of the Irish boom and manufacturer of but one product: A Great Sucking Sound.
On April Fool’s Day, the terms of the new National Asets Management Agency (NAMA) were just being digested — it took the Fianna Fail political party (fail in lower case) 18 months to make a coherent decision about what NAMA (say NAMA, NAMA, Never No More is a folk ballad readers of Ireland Unhinged might help finish). The word was that between 22 and 60 billion euros would have to be coughed up to clean up the profligacy of Sean Fitzpatrick and friends, but to be provided not by Seanie on the lam but Paddy in the field and Patrick in the office or Padraig in the welfare lines with his fellow 14 percent of the population. Brian Cowen, supreme chieftain, was indignant when accused of cozying up to such seaweed and mud bath types as Sean Fitzpatrick.
“I love my country and I did not commit economic treason as you villainously allege and will not hear this,” Cowen more or less said to the Labour Party spokesman Eammon Gilmore.
Back on his moblie phone, “Where are you now, Sean?” the intrepid reporter asked.
“On holiday.”
” Hmmh. People are saying you left the country forever, that you don’t want to face the consequences?”
“I love Ireland to my soul, and I am a patirot to my country,” Sean huffe in a weirdly similar tone as was coming from goverment on high and its newest minister of the Department of Rainbows. “I am only on holiday.”
“But with Interpol watching you, can you say where you are on now?”
Seanie hung up.
