Seanie Fitz is just a symptom of the national disease

The Pope’s pastoral letter has forced Sean Fitzpatrick off the front pages. For the cardinal in Armagh,Sean Brady, the timing must be disappointing. Fitzpatrick had shifted the spotlight from him but now the focus is right back on the Catholic Church.

Brady was ashamed of his handling of the victims of Brendan Smyth in 1975 but, curiously, he discovered his shame - or at least acknowledged it - only when he was found out. The expression of his shame contained no mention of how he himself contributed to the abuse of the two children he had interviewed, by requiring them to take an oath that must have seemed deeply menacing to them; this in the immediate aftermath of them being questioned about the details of their abuse.

That oath requirement was a shocking act, quite aside from the form of the oath that required the boys to keep secret about their ordeal, even in the face of the ‘‘common good’’. How anybody back in 1975 thought this was not itself an outrage is incomprehensible. To add further insult to further insult to further insult to a mountain of injuries, the head of the Catholic Church, Pope Benedict XVI - himself hugely compromised because of his own handling of sex abuse cases while a bishop in Germany - fails to acknowledge his own role and that of the Vatican in the abuse of children here.

Again, an expression of regret that the formalities of canon law were not followed - as though canon law itself was not part of the scandal. There seems a similar denial at work over Fitzpatrick, this time on the part of the Irish ‘‘authorities’’. It had taken the Gardai in this instance exactly 15months to put questions to Fitzpatrick after he had acknowledged he had disguised loans to him of up to €87 million from Anglo Irish Bank by moving the loans to Irish Nationwide immediately before the annual audits and moving them back after the audits were completed.

It was 13 months from the time it was known he had engaged in disguising the true state of Anglo’s financial state by shifting around €4 billion between Anglo and Irish Life before and after audits. There is an issue here as to how such substantial loans were not properly recorded on Anglo’s balance sheet. How is it,therefore,that it took the gardai 13 and 15 months, respectively, to respond to clear prima facie evidence, by immediately interviewing the central character in the enterprise?

Instead, they waited until early last Thursday morning to arrest Fitzpatrick at his home and interview him for a day and a half. But that is not all they did. They tipped off the media and also searched his home. It has all the hallmarks of a public relations gimmick. Why did they not ask Fitzpatrick to come down to the Garda station at, say, 10.30am last Thursday? Why the need for an arrest? It wasn’t as though he was in hiding. He had lived openly here for the last 15 months. He worked in and regularly attended an office at Grand Canal Dock.

As for the raid on his home, if he did have any incriminating material there, is it remotely plausible that he would not have removed it at some stage in the last 15 months? It has all the hallmarks of spin to show the gardai were doing something, responding to public demands for a head. But there may be big problems in delivering a head - certainly in delivering Fitzpatrick’s head. It seems that Anglo Irish Bank regularly reported to the Financial Regulator the movement of the money concerned. Was it the case that the Financial Regulator’s office saw no problem with what was being done, and indicated its approval? Or was it the case that they never asked the right questions?

If the Regulator did know, then how could Fitzpatrick be convicted of offences that the Financial Regulator either knew of and did not complain about, or knew of and approved? The recklessness of Anglo under Fitzpatrick has done enormous social harm. But wasn’t he egged on in his excesses - if not explicitly, then implicitly - by the culture of rampant capitalism spurred on and glorified by the Fianna Fail/PD governments? Worse still, didn’t the government, the Minister for Finance and the Department of Finance turn a blind eye to what was unfolding at Anglo Irish Bank?

Michael Somers, then head of the National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA), told an Oireachtas committee last autumn that he had known that Anglo was in trouble from 2007, so was reluctant to deposit money with it. Incidentally, he also said he had come under enormous pressure to deposit money with Anglo. When asked who had exerted that pressure, he said Anglo had. Could a basket-case bank exert ‘‘enormous pressure’’ on him of its own accord? Could pressure also have come from somewhere else? If so, I wonder where? (Actually, I don’t wonder at all, for I have a very good idea where the pressure came from.)

And hasn’t Patrick Holohan, the now unassailably authoritative figure on banking since he became governor of the Central Bank (I don’t intend this remark to be sardonic, for I regarded him as authoritative long before his appointment), said it was obvious that Anglo was heading for trouble from around 2004? So if Somers and Holohan knew that Anglo was in trouble from way back, how come nobody else noticed? Is it plausible that, for instance, Somers did not mention it to a minister - or at least someone in the Department of Finance?

The real scandal in all this is not what Fitzpatrick did, or even what Anglo did. It was how we allowed financial institutions, owned and controlled by a massively wealthy elite, to gain such enormous power in our society so that, when they got into trouble because of their own recklessness, the rest of society had to bail them out at enormous social cost.

It’s the Fianna Fail boyos and Mary Harney who allowed that to happen. It is they who should have been in Bray Garda station for a day and a half last week.