A few weeks after I was made business editor of the Sunday Independent I went out to lunch with editor Aengus Fanning and a senior management type.

On the agenda was the progress of this newspaper’s attempt to compete with the dull business supplements then emerging from our competitors. As so often happened with Aengus, there was a sense of friction when anyone tried to snipe at his staff or his products.

The management type was unenthusiastic about the tone of the pages, and distinctly sniffy about our descent into critical populism. He had been receiving flak from his business chums. They were meant to feel that this was their section. It should be authoritative and far more business-friendly.

Confident that the sort of heresy the business section was pursuing would appeal to him, I looked to Aengus for support.

Aengus was unpredictable as ever. He was vehement: “Do you know the one thing I do not want to see in my business section?” he demanded. Both of us looked puzzled, because with Aengus you never knew what was coming next .
(more…)

Monday

A wonderful week is haunted by the ghosts of bankers past. The Queen may come and the Queen may go, but Ireland’s bankers are still calling the shots.

As I head for London on the early Cityjet flight I spot the first ghost. Former Bank of Ireland chief Richard Burrows is sitting at the front of the plane in the exclusive ‘Cityplus’ section.
(more…)

BRIAN Cowen is a thoroughly decent man. He is good fun, loyal, honest and able. He does not deserve the personal humiliation inflicted on him in the past week. Yet he is a politician paralysed in the ethos of a bygone age.
(more…)

Together with Nick Webb, I have written a new book, ‘Wasters’, that has just been published (in shops now, retailing for aprox. €15). ‘Wasters’ tells the story of the scandal of public waste in Ireland, as exemplified by our exposés of extravagance and junketry in public bodies FAS and CIE, amongst others.

An exclusive extract appeared in the Sunday Independent:

Two weeks after his own report on waste and excess throughout the public sector was released, it has been revealed that the State’s spending watchdog, the Comptroller & Auditor General (C&AG), is not above an occasional junket on the taxpayer.

Information obtained under the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act and revealed in the new book Wasters — by the Sunday Independent’s Shane Ross and Nick Webb — shows that between 2007 and 2010, the C&AG John Buckley and his predecessor John Purcell travelled to conferences around the world at the taxpayers’ expense.

(more…)

‘The bank is dead. Long live the bank.’

LAST week they came to bury Anglo. And they came to rescue AIB. Brian Lenihan’s insistence that if he had allowed Anglo to go to the wall it would have torpedoed AIB, began to ring true.

The accepted view in government circles was that abandoning Anglo would have toppled Ireland’s banking dominos; that AIB was particularly vulnerable as it shared dodgy developer clients; that the liquidation of one could bankrupt the other; that they shared an addiction to property. What was not so apparent was that they shared a flawed culture. The big news last week was not Anglo at all.
(more…)