A truly appalling vista for taxpayers

To be an Irish taxpayer has been a profoundly depressing experience in the past week. A week on from the day we got the bill for cleaning up the banking system, people remain numbed by the scale of the truly stratospheric figures that will be required to keep these entities afloat, in particular the numbers that pertain to Anglo Irish Bank. The citizens of this country will end up paying for the horrendous mistakes bankers made for generations to come as a result. The massive bill facing the very angry people of this country is monumental in its scale. No developed European country has every faced such a financial catastrophe before as the realisation sinks in that the country's reducing tax base does not have the wherewithal to meet the financial demands about to be placed upon it by having to clean up the mess left behind by the property bubble bursting, the implosion of the construction sector and the virtual collapse of the banks. The Irish taxpayer already has pumped in €11 billion to keep the doors open at Anglo, AIB and Bank of Ireland. Now Anglo needs a further €8bn to cover its immediate losses and is likely to need a further €10bn. AIB requires over €7bn more and BoI between two and three billion if it does not manage to raise private capital on its own. With Irish Nationwide and EBS needing around €3.5bn between them, the final bill will add up to something like €42 billion, a simply staggering sum. There is undisguised and incandescent anger among a people who have been battered and bruised not only by this economic recession but also by the specific mess Ireland as a country has to contend with because of the outrageous actions of a handful of reckless individuals who gambled with all our futures and lost big-time. Unfettered by light-touch regulation and a Government asleep at the wheel, they have taken the country to the very edge of an abyss from which it will be very difficult to pull back. We are told the only way to prevent economic default is to continue to throw billions of euro into the money pit that Anglo Irish Bank has become, consigning all taxpayers to financial servitude for the rest of their lives - and the lives of their children, too. It has become clear in the aftermath of last week's revelations and the debate that is only now beginning to rage around whether Anglo should be allowed to fail or not or whether it is of systemic importance to the economy (clearly it is not), that the blanket bank guarantee announced in dramatic fashion by the Government in September 2008 has shackled all of us to this millstone. This guarantee means that the Irish taxpayer will cover and repay all losses incurred by corporate bondholders were the bank to go under. Smaller lenders with toxic loans could, it has been argued, be killed off without any seismic effects, but Anglo's liabilities top €89 billion. All this is leading to a growing sense of disempowerment and even hopelessness among people that cannot be allowed to take root. It is certainly difficult not to feel powerless in the face of such a massive deficit building up, the huge destruction of wealth, loss of income from the jobs crisis and the abject failure of those who were once looked up to in Ireland in terms of leadership - the political class, the banking sector and the Church. One starting point on any road to recovery must be the provision of information to the public on the Government's calculations as to why so much of Irish taxpayer money needs to be swallowed up in feeding the monster that Anglo has become. In addition, in the midst of this crisis, there has not been one word about how the Government proposes to create jobs, revitalise the economy and boost consumer confidence as the rest of the world edges out of recession. Irish families who will be saddled with at least an additional €2,000 bill a year to keep zombie financial institutions afloat need to be given some hope that there is something over the horizon for them during these dark days for a country and an economy that was once the envy of Europe. How things can change in such a short period of time.