Taoiseach Micheál Martin (centre left) with former taoiseach Brian Cowen in 2011
“The banks were not bailed out” – Taoiseach Mícheál Martin tells the Dáil that bank shareholders were not bailed out during the financial crisis @rtenews pic.twitter.com/a01nJejHrF
— RTÉ Politics (@rtepolitics) December 16, 2020
Ah.
Here.
FIGHT!
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said like a true school teacher
They weren’t bailed out? Ok, cool, does that mean I can get some of my USC back then?
He made an apology https://www.irishtimes.com/news/martin-apologises-for-ff-role-in-economic-downturn-1.475061
What he has said just there just shows you what that apology actually meant. So we did not bail out the banks. What was actually done was a wise investment where we the tax payer will make a profit in the end. A bailout to me is where you know you are not going to get back what was put in…..that to me is a bailout. Have we got back 64 billion????
Sure the IMF weren’t in town either.
The money was just resting in their accounts
His wife’s account apparently.
Oh sure Mick. And I’m Dolly Parton.
Millie Booby Browne
;)
If wishes were tits I’d have loads of them.
Or something.
in fairness, Boyd Barrett has been ripping new ones for the two boys taking their turn at being Taoiseach
Its the early effects of the vaccine. Sounds like Varadkar.
‘…and if you ever got to power, thousands and thousands of jobs would migrate from this country’ MM to RBB.
Hundreds of thousands of Irish citizens emigrated from this country in the past decade. – courtesy of FFG.
Michilín hasn’t an iota.
https://youtu.be/JTf9BdeytbQ
Darragh O Brian was asked about Michilín’s outburst and said
“There was obviously equity put into the banks so the banks didn’t fail… one of the ways of describing that is indeed a bailout.”
A masterclass from Mickeen. Talk a load of horsedung so everyone forgets about the Debenhams workers, which is what the discussion was about, and then go on holiday. For a month.
3 million of taxpayers money for retraining ain’t nothing.
‘The Party told you to reject all evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.’
– 1984, George Orwell
Rob_G/Cian (in case you’re scanning here)
here’s a prime example of the type of doublespeak that turns people off FFG….one of those “inexplicable” ఠ_ఠ reasons that people could turn to SF come GE time. LOL. Columbo is not required here.
perhaps MM just “mis-spoke” there? er nope, it’s an utterly blatant (and fairly pants) attempt at revisionism. or he’s deluded. either way it’s mental and another reason for people to mistrust.
He is correct.
The banks shareholder were not bailed out. The value of the shares plummeted.
AIB shared went from €24 to under €1
So Seanie Fitz’s debt write off of €7m, together with the other Anglo shareholders? That doesn’t constitute a bailout?
Cian, you miss my point maybe here, it’s pure doublespeak to say something like that and until he clarifies precisely what he said and meant (and he should apologise into the bargain because there’s a lot of insult and hurt in there) it’s at least a partially false statement…..nay until he clarifies it this conflation IS a false statement (it’s being widely interpreted as such as we write here by better people than me anyway lol) we can go consult the Oxford English for the word “Bailout” and go all pinheaded on interpretation but from what I’m reading he claimed two things this afternoon, namely:
a) the banks weren’t bailed out and b) the shareholders of the banks weren’t bailed out
are you seriously trying to tell me that a) is true in any shape or form?
He’s Taoiseach. He was also in the thick of it when the sht hit the fan back in ’08. His words matter. This is no mistake in my view, it’s an attempt to cleanse history and it’s an insult to everyone “who partied”. If that’s not the case he has to clarify and apologise quickly.
grrrrr
My apologies.
I saw the clip above and thought it was just about the shareholders.
a) is false – the banks were bailed out
b) is true – the bank shareholders were not bailed out
“I saw the clip above and thought it was just about the shareholders”
Really?
The first sentence out of Michilín’s mouth was ‘The banks were not bailed out’
Indeed. There was no context to the clip. It looked to me, on first watching, to be an incomplete sentence, which he then repeated the start bit and added onto the end.
I got it wrong.. I apologised.
Like Cian said – if you were a bank shareholder in ’08, your investment would end up being worth pennies on the euro – the banks were ‘bailed out’ so that they were able to keep operating; bank shareholders lost about 99.5% of their investment.
Bailing out Anglo was a catastrophic mistake; however bailing out the other banks made good sense, the country would have been screwed if the banking system collapsed.
“one of those “inexplicable” ఠ_ఠ reasons that people could turn to SF come GE time”
– Sinn Féin voted to bail out the banks. And this is not to have a go at you, but I bet a lot of voters who trumpet lines about ‘FFG’ and ‘banksters’, and who may even have voted for SF, don’t know that; a lot of people have been… weaponised by the commentary surrounding these famous bailouts.
The taxpayer was put on the hook for 440 thousand million.
440000000000.
But we had no choice, and worse still you believe this?
If the banks had have collapsed, tens of thousands of people (hundreds of thousands?) would have lost their life savings – it was the lesser of two evils.
This is what governments have to do – make tough decisions that will likely pee off vast swaths of the electorate, but where the alternative is much, much worse. If you want to see what happens when you vacillate, look no further than Greece.
yep Rob_G on some of the points you make there re. Anglo. it should have been let go to the wall full stop (and there should have been prison time)
on likes of AIB it will be argued for years to come, studied in Uni courses worldwide no doubt…maybe there was no other way out but things could have been handled differently in the aftermath years, we are carrying real debt, real people suffered, we are loaded on interest rate, the effects persist today etc. could that bailout event have been avoided….without it we’d probably have been screwed as you say (would we be arguing over different colours of screwed here tho?)
I’d far prefer to see MM positively own, accept and even try to justify the bailout situation and play it that way, it’s a definite (until I hear differently out of his mouth tomorrow) cleansing attempt, what’s he playing at here? that angers me, how dare he, we all were there, it did happen, we are slowly moving on but ffs don’t pretend it didn’t happen!
SF? yes, very likely I’d say….but maybe that would be less about the event itself and more about the aftermath…I imagine someone might be motivated to protest vote when they see the likes of Sean Fitzpatrick and Fingers Fingleton literally getting away with it but knowing of someone on their uppers taking a trip to Mountjoy because they haven’t paid the TV licence etc.
@Golden – I encourage you to look up the true costs of servicing the bailout; from memory, it was €3bn per year.
Now this isn’t nothing, obviously, but during the 6-7 years when we were borrowing to keep the lights on, the vast majority of this money went on current expenditure (public servant salaries that grew to mental levels due to benchmarking, social welfare, etc) – not on servicing the bailout.
The country was fupped when the economy collapsed, and would have been anyway, regardless as to whether we had bailed out the banks or not – bailing out the banks was, in the end, a very small part of it.
the net cost (after equity + shares disposals, dividends and fees paid to us) is, as of now, around €47 billion
gone
Yes – and that sucks, it really does. But it was still much favourable than the alterative – allowing people’s savings to be wiped out overnight, it would have calamitous, not only for the people involved, but in terms of confidence in the economy and the country’s institutions.
and the €1.6bn paid to deutsche bank? no legal obligation, just us being “nice”
If we had not have paid this round of debts, how would we have borrowed the tens of billions that we needed to keep the lights on over the next 6 years – who would lend to us if they thought we might arbitrarily decide not to pay our debts? How would we pay for schools and hospitals, if no-one would lend us money?
“this round of debts” weren’t our debts to start with
nothing to do with us
You’re just arguing for how you wish things were, and not how they actually are.
Take a look at what happens in the event of a sovereign default – Argentina went into default in 2002, and this is what their inflation rate is, 20 years later:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/316750/inflation-rate-in-argentina/
nobody is talking about a “sovereign default”
these werent sovereign debts
Should we have gone the same strategy as Iceland?
On the eve of the Bank Guarantee, a calamitous situation was being painted by FF – which SF was of the opinion that it should support a bank guarantee.
Now, Rob – here’s the actuality of the vote. When the supporting legislation was released two weeks later it did not support the measures. They voted against it.
Once again you prove your inability to take in information and process it.
WRONG, as usual – SF *voted* in favour of the motion on the 28th of September. Do you never get tired of being wrong?
what was SF’s position on bailing out the junior bondholders?
I couldn’t tell you – I’m guessing they fudged it and hedged their bets in the end (half-bailout, half burning bondholders).
I’m guessing “I couldnt tell you” is FGer code for “oh, yeah, I wont be answering that one”
well, I don’t know, I’m not an expert on the many, many policy positions of SF – perhaps you’ll enlighten me.
The state of Cowen in that photo. I think it was Orwell who said, ” by the time he is fifty, every man has the face he deserves”.
Is he still alive? Last I heard of him, he was in a bad way.
I looked it up, he died in January 1950 aged 46, from TB related lung injury.
A Great Bunch of Lads Altogether, patriots to the marrow of their bones.
Really just a question of which river they sell the country down.
“Those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it”
I can’t say who said it, but they hit the nail on the head.
Comment on this story is prevented on The Journal’s webpage.
Funny that.
Up Broadhsheet!
What does The Journal and those that work for it, think its function actually is?
Bizarre organisation, with seriously flawed judgment at editorial level.
If the banks and the rest of them were not bailed out who put up the liquidity to the 64 odd billion
it certainly was mot the owners i.e. the shareholders, is Martin for real, if this is his recollection of
2008, then he should not be the leader of Fianna Fail or the Country…..IMF never arrived here
either no were there the widespread public expenditure cuts and the USC is a fiction…..any
other Country the likes of him would be shamed out of office