LIVING IN NAMALAND

In 2012 Frank Connolly's book entitled Tom Gilmartin: The Man Who Brought Down A Taoiseach was published. It was a mind-piercing account , most carefully researched, into how trade, commerce, politics in Ireland interweave in a desperate rush for profit,  and how people and community suffer as a result.

Now Frank Connolly has given us another book, entitled Namaland .  It is the story of Ireland's National Asset Management Agency that , as Frank Connolly writes ..." was established to repair the mistakes caused by excessive greed and corruption across Irish business, banking and political systems....".  It is the story of the interaction of banks, property developers, politicians and , a reader  can hardly help suspecting, the inaction or inefficiency of  some  agencies  and inspectorates set up to avoid such horrors.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

Ireland was hurled into financial chaos through this interaction of banks, developers , politicians and others and in the end as usual we ordinary folk had to gather up what crumbs were left on the masters' disintegrating table.  People already faced with a decreasing value of money -life savings  encouraged by government were already  reducing to near nothing - were presented with the concept of banks  "being too big to be allowed to fail", large stores of money heaped up privately and corporately - in one place or another - waiting, not to relieve the financial strain on poorer people but lying comparatively idle only to be  invested when the level of profit got high enough to satisfy. Shortage of money is  not the  problem, hoarding  is, as grim an offence against fellow citizens as hoarding food in a bad harvest time.  NAMALAND  reveals the mechanism, the mechanics who worked  it, the scale, the result and the  government arranged remedy which at times proved astonishingly  like favouring people of the same kind again, perhaps even some of the same people. 

For us ordinary folk the scale of the money manoeuvred in the pursuit of profit is staggering  as we read of someone leaving Ireland owing 450 million Euro, property deals  in Dublin which  need to attract enormous profit in  housing in a city where there is dire need of affordable  housing for the  majority of people who cannot  pursue  larger and larger profits by swooping  when  the moment arrives  to open  their vaults and invest.  

Frank Connolly does not put it like this , his treatment is admirably free from either rhetoric or righteous indignation even though there is plenty to be righteously indignant about. NAMA took over  debts of failed or failing enterprises, not necessarily failing through mismanagement or natural disaster but also through a new and damaging fever of lending by banks  not only in Ireland but primarily in Europe where bonuses could be had for persuading  clients to borrow more than they were normally likely to be able to repay  There were warnings that the money value of property - on which lenders depended for much of their profits - cannot go on rising forever and someday the boom will bust. Many people were left high and dry including those whose hard work had made them successful and whose enterprise would now be taken and sold to the highest bidders whoever they might be and wherever they might come from.  A  TD who said Ireland was being sold to the highest bidder had a lot of truth in what he said. But not only the highest bidders would benefit ,  the game was joined by advisers, politicians , officials and one person and another whose services were highly prized in all this, even though there were suggestions of irregularities in a system which does not fail but works admirably for those who know when to leap in and when to leap out of it. With advice which may be highly political as well as economic.

My Father who gave me some important lessons in his homely way about politics and money used to say people in his day felt they should lift their hats passing the bank  ( it was a reference to the Irish custom of men raising their hats or caps reverently passing a church ) , such was the reverence, sometimes fear, they had of the lenders of scarce money. He could never have imagined a time when banks would not only lend but would persuade clients to borrow more than they could afford to borrow , and when  such transactions could earn a handsome bonus for the persuader , whatever about risk for the borrower.  

These two books are so thoroughly researched, so detailed, and so incisively getting into the heart of often complicated  matters  that even for us ordinary folk it is possible to find the story even if  it is hard to understand so many details of it.

Two books that  should be read by everyone of us who grieves at how manipulation of capital and the increasing trend  of politics and business  towards profit before people has undone much of the good we thought we had achieved towards  a rational management of wealth.