Just over 20 years the Cork University professor, Joe Lee, published a history of modern of Ireland that focused on the dominance of possession (of power, property, land, a rent-generating activity, a secure, pensionable job, etc) over performance.

This is accompanied by, and reflected in, localised political clientelism, corruption of a soft and insidious variety, cronyism among the political, business and professional elites and corporatism advancing the interests of the management and staff of state-owned interests at the expense of the public.

By examining the economic and social progress achieved by other small European countries, Joe Lee was able to conclude that this obsession with possession accounted for much of Ireland’s relatively poor performance since independence in 1922.

http://www.economist.com/agenda/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14025314&fsrc=rss&mode=comment&intent=readBottom

But why save them all?

In the free market that is (supposedly) the EU, by all means let’s have some foreign banks on our High Streets. There should be at least one though that is home-grown: an economy of our size, even in a reduced state, ought to naturally produce a few sound/prudent financial institutions.

(We may have to scout overseas though for sound/prudent bank executives however. I’m inclined to headhunt in either Norway or Canada).

Our problem was that we had way too many banks looking to create, at all costs, way too much domestic business.

Shedding a few of these would surely be a welcome relief and not have a drastic effect on neither our system nor our international reputation.

It’s not a bad thing and is likely to happen anyway. from what I hear AIB needs further recapitalisation which will mean that the state (ie. us) will have to take a larger ownership stake in it. the more we own of a bank, the more we influence its management, this, in my view, is close to nationalisation anyway.

In summary, we’re going to have to spend an utter fortune to clean up the banks and get a functioning banking system (eg 60bn or something). even though AIB and BoI are huge parts of the iseq and probably held by lots of irish pension funds, perhaps we should let them crash if they cannot make it work themselves…. nationalist feelings aside, I wouldn’t be averse to having a foreign bank offer merchant and retail banking in Ireland. if we can’t do it ourselves, feck it, import a solution!