Boomerang_ Travels in the New Third World - Michael D. Lewis [52]
There is an ancient rule of financial life—if you owe the bank 5 million bucks, the bank owns you, but if you owe the bank 5 billion bucks, you own the bank—that newly applies to Ireland. The debts of Ireland’s big property developers—defined as anyone who owed the bank more than 20 million euros—are now being worked out behind closed doors. In exchange for helping the government to manage or liquidate their real estate portfolios, the biggest failures have been spared bankruptcy. Smaller developers, like McNamara, are in a far harder place; and while no one seems to know how many of these people exist, the number is clearly big. Ireland’s National Asset Management Agency controls roughly 80 billion euros’ worth of commercial property loans. An Irish property expert named Peter Bacon, who advised NAMA when it was created, recently revealed that when he’d added up the smaller Irish property-related loans (those under 20 million euros), they amounted to another 80 billion euros. Some very large number of former Irish tradesmen are in exactly Joe McNamara’s situation. Some very large number of Irish homeowners are in something very like it.
The difference between McNamara and everyone else is that he’d complained about it, publicly. But then, apparently, had genuinely thought better of it. I’d tracked down and phoned his ex-wife, who just laughed and told me to get lost. I finally reached McNamara himself, ambushing him on his cell phone. But he only muttered something about not wanting to draw further attention to himself, then hung up. It was only after I texted him to say I was en route to his hometown that he became sufficiently aroused to communicate. “What are you doing in Keel????” he hollered by text message, more than once. “Tell me Why are you going to Keel???” Then, once again, he fell silent. “The problem with the Irish people,” Ian says, as we drive away from the black hole that bankrupted Joe McNamara, “is that you can push them and push them and push them. But when they break they go wacko.” (A month later, after a period of silence, McNamara would reappear, screaming from the top of a building crane that he had driven across the country and ditched, once again, in front of the Parliament.)
TWO THINGS STRIKE every Irish person when he comes to America, Irish friends tell me: the vastness of the country, and the seemingly endless desire of its people to talk about their personal problems. Two things strike an American when he comes to Ireland: how small it is, and how tight-lipped. An Irish person with a personal problem takes it into a hole with him, like a squirrel with a nut before winter. He tortures himself and sometimes his loved ones, too. What he doesn’t do, if he has suffered some reversal, is vent about it to the outside world. The famous Irish gift of gab is a cover for all the things they aren’t telling you.
So far as I could see, by November 10, 2010, the population of Irish people willing to make a stink about what has happened to them had been reduced to one: the egg-thrower. The next day we pull up outside his home, a modest old row house on the outskirts of Dublin. The cheery elderly gentleman who opens the door in a neat burgundy sweater and well-pressed slacks has, among his other qualities, fantastically good manners. He has the ability to seem pleased even when total strangers ring his doorbell, and to make them feel welcome. On the table in Gary Keogh’s small and tidy dining room is a book, created by his grandchildren, dated May 2009. Granddad’s Eggcellent Adventure, it is called.
In the months after Brian Lenihan’s bank bailout, Keogh, for the first time in his life, began to pay attention to the behavior of the Irish bankers. His own shares in AIB, once thought to be as sound as cash or gold, were rapidly becoming worthless, but the bank’s executives exhibited not the first hint of remorse or shame. AIB’s chairman, Dermot Gleeson, and its CEO, Eugene Sheehy,