I want to correct something I said in my last posting.
I said: "The failures of the banks were not directly against individual citizens, but against the whole country".
I want to correct that.
The banks DID fail individuals who owned shares: ordinary people who bought shares in AIB, BoI, and Anglo.
And they DID fail individual customers. They did so by giving them mortgages in cases where (a) the property was ridiculously overvalued and (b) they gave them a loan which was too big when compared with their salaries (and therefore ability to repay).
There was a time when a bank would only give a couple a mortgage amount of 2.5 times their combined salary, and they would be expected to pay at least 10% of the cost of the house themselves. These rules were dropped by the banks with reckless abandon.
I choose to think of this as a crime against those people. Not a crime in the sense of something punishable by law unfortunately. But a crime in the sense which the dictionary defines as "a grave offence especially against morality".
I subscribe to the belief that people in this situation should be able to hand the keys back to the bank and walk away from the loan. They should be able to say: "We both gambled, we both lost". But no, this does not happen, of course. Not for ordinary people. Not in Ireland. They are expected to repay the loan. Even when the house is no longer worth the loan amount. Even when the economy has collapsed and one or both of the people may have lost their jobs. Even when the banks made a major contribution to that collapse.