Forlorn Celtic Tiger
Where are they? Who are they? You know; the women bankers, auditors, property developers, stockbrokers, industry regulators, etc., responsible for pricking the Oirish bubble with a sharpened golf club. The ruthless go-getting millionairesses who cleared the way for spiralling unemployment, a kaput banking system, demolished property sector, an albatross of debt and all the rest of the yack you’ve been hearing all over the telly for the last year. It’s not a facetious question, I’m genuinely curious. I asked a male journo friend a while ago, who makes a living writing ‘business’ articles: “How come we haven’t witnessed the usual media ‘witch-hunt’ of women (semi)responsible for the bust?” *pause* “Eh, they were probably caught up writing memos or getting their nails done at the time,” he quipped. [He considers himself awfully gas altogether].
From the off it was big-boy names being flung on the turbo charged execution cart: Bertie Ahern, Brian Cowen, Brian Lenihan, Pat Neary, Lehman Brothers, Liam Carroll, Seanie Fitzpatrick, Brian Goggin, Padraig Walshe, Sean Quinn, John Hurley, Sean Dunne, Dermot Gleeson and so on. Newspapers were keen to pinpoint the perpetrators in articles throughout this OMG awakening. With the exception of hearing Mary Harney dubbed a deregulation fetishist or the likes of Anne Heraty, former bank director and stock broker, I cannot locate the ’wimmin’ in this sordid tale. Even when it came to the Yellow Brick Road venture of NAMA, the cock-stock was made up of high-ranking banking officials, men in the pinstriped wink, nod and know: Frank Daly, public interest director at Anglo Irish Bank, the bank that likes to say a multi-orgasmic “yes yes yes yes yes yes!”, until there’s nothing left; along with colleagues Michael Connolly, Peter Stewart, Brian McEnery, Willie Soffe and some other guys…Aside from Eilish Finan − an independent Consultant and Director in various Financial Services Industry sectors − appointees to the board of NAMA are men.
I’m not an economist (if I was I’d have nice clothes, a car, a holiday home and an Irish wolfhound) or even a business journalist (if I was I’d have nice clothes, a car, a holiday home and a Yorkshire Terrier), but to my mind the entire environment in which the Celtic Tiger blackguards operated was exceptionally macho. There was a testosterone-fuelled air to the whole enfant terrible. Even the media language deployed: ‘Celtic Tiger Man’ or ‘Breakfast Roll Man’ etc. was ever so vigorous and potent. There was a real sense of aggression in the urban professional Irish male, particularly in Dublin. Places like Baggot Street were full of young geezers guffawing over caramelised scallops in the Unicorn during ‘very important’ business lunches. Down at the financial services district there was a real swagger in the way the men used to walk, talk, and conduct themselves. I remember Googling: ‘why do men wear ties?’ because there seemed to be a pandemic of scorching power-colour ties, more than usual. Red: excitement, desire, speed, strength, power, aggression, danger, war, a sprawling economy. Purple: flamboyant, wise, arrogant. The ritual wearing of ties, by the way, dates back to 17th Century wars. It’s not just a cloth arrow pointing to his wotsit. I found it all very unpleasant at the time.
It chimed too with a sense of national smugness…that we were the new masters of the universe and the Brits were down at heel, and that soon we would be so rich that even the stupid unionists would give up the ghost and accept a united Ireland. The gorilla chest-beating was strewn across all jungle paths of Irish life: politics, economics, the retail sector. At the height of boom (2005-2006) Ireland had proportionately the highest number of sports cars (yes, penis extensions) in Europe and the highest number of year-in registrations. I lived in Smithfield then and almost all of the top-quality penthouses were rented by young single business men who snorted cocaine and watched Fashion TV in-between making Ireland great. “Hi my name’s Paedar, I work in the IFSC, I rent the glass penthouse over there…” Penthouses riddled with Bang & Olufsen and every wall-hanging gadget imaginable. I knew quite a few sassy career women too, but for some reason they didn’t have the same chutzpah or cockiness towards themselves or their jobs.
The fiscal cauldron was brimming over with ‘fabulous’ men who couldn’t shut up about our endless wealth and the part they were playing in rainbow-nabbing it. Our GDP per capita rose from 60% of the EU average to 120%. Women with similar Tigerish jobs were just too busy to brag, it seems. But they were definitely out there: we were told over and over of uptakes of women on third level business courses throughout the boom, women studying economics, a sharp rise in female entrepeneurs, organisations like WITS began to appear…equal opportunities at the highest levels of power in the land, even in the civil service for God’s sake! There must’ve been women property developers who squandered millions in rice-paper transactions? Women who took part in dirty deals, secured multi-million euro loans over the phone in the dead of night from beaches in Donegal, sanctioned nonsensical far-off investments, who later took part in hiding it all with the help of politically connected mates, who now owe more than they’ll ever be able to pay back in several lifetimes.
What part did Irish women play in the catastrophic decision making, at business level, that flung us into financial decay for decades? I’m wondering why these women didn’t appear on Late Late slots like Harry Crosbie or Mick Wallace did. I’m wondering why I hear of ‘developer’s wives’ in the abstract, and not women who surely snapped up glass towers in Dubai or beach villas in Cape Verde when it was trendy and apt to do so. Boy journalists are spinning out reams of books on the bust, so perhaps I’ll start my research there. Maybe even a Diarmaid Ferriter of the future will answer my question: where are the women who helped ruin Ireland? I promise to have my nails done and I’ll listen intently…I might even write a memo on it if I can put my cocktail down for long enough.
June Caldwell is a writer, who after 13 years of journalism, is finally writing a novel. She has a MA in Creative Writing and was winner of ‘Best Blog Post’ award at the 2011 Irish Blog Awards. You can read this post on her own blog here:
I have never thought of ties as cloth arrows pointing to their wotsits but now I know where my eyes will lead to the next time I see one…!
Very interesting post. Goes to show the glass ceiling brings its just desserts – if big men are in power, the big men must therefore take the blame.
Pauline Conroy presented a paper at last year’s TASC conference on this.
and:
You can read the paper here:
http://www.tascnet.ie/upload/Banking%20Crisis_PC.doc
Excellent post, June.
Macho swagger and risky economics go hand in hand.
Hugh! That is excellent info. Amazing. I was reluctant to even write about this cos it seems so obvious and waspish, but still goes unsaid. The stats for women in education and health are staggering and how the cuts apply. Megan, Naomi: thanks. Jobs for the boys also ultimately means economic disaster thanks to the boys. There’s still only 13 odd percent of women in the Dail. Ireland needs more girl power at the highest levels!
But June, didn’t you know that negative equity is the ultimate legacy of feminism?
http://www.turbulenceahead.com/2009/11/indebted-to-feminism.html
Holy Cow, I could barely make it past: ‘fetishising paid employment over all other choices…’. What claptrap!
Brilliant post, June, and an excellent contribution from Hugh.
I too will never look at a tie the same way again.
After Iceland’s crash (slightly earlier than the rest of us) their female Prime Minister put two women in charge of their main bank. They argued that banking should carry more overtly feminine values.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/22/iceland-women
Not sure how they’re doing now but would be an interesting follow up for someone who’d had enough of beach holidays, no?
Cheers Amanda. I like making myself angry! On the ‘tie’ issue (What the hell are they for…! Men can never answer me on that one. I think they look hideous)…I wrote a blog once about men’s ties, their function, the subliminal message, etc. I could only surmise they’re like those thick-cut Powerpoint arrows, pointing downwards, reminding us always, even in business meetings. If you watch programmes like Tonight with Vincent Browne/TV3, you’ll notice the tie colour is nearly always grrrrrhhhhhhh red. That’s interesting info on Iceland, will look into it. I felt almost ‘silly’ for writing this but have been thinking it for ages.
Spent time this afternoon thinking about this post (have often moaned to mates about the issue) and I was trying to plot the correlation to the make up of panels/talking heads on Irish radio and television programmes discussing the ruin or making it better. It’s still a women free zone mainly apart from the excellent contributions from Joan Burton. Suzanne Kelly the tax accountant is another woman who contributes from time to time.
My theorem at the moment ergo – men get to f*ck things up and then talk about how they would unf*ck them or investigate the f*ckers.
It’s kinda politely bizarre, isn’t it? We’ve been run into the ground by a bunch of Mummy’s boys on artificial ego boosters. Burn the ties!!!! *only joking*
It would certainly be interesting to see if in some future alternative scenario, would women be transferring assets into the names of their husbands — or children — and would the action be regarded in the same manner.
This is a good & thoughtful article. It seems at times that there are more women in positions of prominence here (President, Tainsite) compared to the US (Nancy Pelosi only arrived as a comparative example in 2006). Clearly we all have a long way to go.
Naturally there are all the dangerous what-if’s — would a greater female presence have meant a dilution of the insane/macho attitude (perhaps Ethna Tinney’s tilting at the EBS windmill will get her a statue one day)? Or is thinking that a more mixed assemblage would not suffer from the same arrogant group-think an application of gender bias? If we’re here in 20 years after the same thing has happened again, with a greater female representation in positions of power, will some argue that the women had to act like everyone else in the old boy’s club to get along? Is that what Sarah Palin is doing?
I don’t know about the future and can’t comment on it Tim, I’m only really commenting on the present or asking a question about the present circumstances we’re in. But you’ve raised some interesting points (ta!) re: a mixed assemblage. I think what’s glaring here is that those at the top levels of [deluded] power, particulalry in the banking sector, were men who thought they were invincible. I do believe this criminal national disaster was caused by total macho over-confidence and foolhardiness that was allowed veer out of all control. A blind bullish gung-ho that ignored all the danger signs and even the facts. I talked to someone a while ago who’s now charged with going into the banks and looking at these decisions (again, a man has been asked to do this job) and he said the decisions were nothing short of crazy. A man in the West got a €8 or €18 million (canne remember which sum) loan ‘over the phone’ at 11.30pm at night towards the building of a shopping centre. The bank agreed this loan and the shopping centre was never built. When the ‘forensic accountant’ – now working for the bank investigating this sum and others that weren’t considered any way ‘high risk’ at the time – followed coordinates to the location recently, it was a small beach….nowhere ever suitable for a shopping centre! The guy who got the loan answered his mobile phone from Portugal where he’s now hiding out and explained that on the night he asked for the loan, he was drunk and it was dark, the guy selling him the land had failed to mention the land was a beach. They had got talking in the pub and he took him to the site and the deal was made. He got the loan and used the money ‘elsewhere’ on a project that didn’t work either. This is not heresay, the story is going to be included in a documentary being made this year. These are the type of decisions I’m talking about. I’m not saying here that women are not capable of making the same barbarous mistakes…but they’re hardly likely to have these high-ranking jobs in our culture to begin with. It’s something to think about and look at and be aware of. Very few women were involved in this incredibly unique f**k-up we find ourselves in. I had to ‘state’ that, even though I don’t have any answers either!
The overall point is well-taken. But the name Gillian Bowler does come to mind:
http://www.rte.ie/business/2009/0515/ilp.html
Gender balance would certainly be healthy, and probably would have led to more of the questioning so badly lacking. But having a woman in charge of Irish Life and Permanent did not stop its absolutely outrageous conduct with Anglo-Irish.
One name in a sea of many, but yes, that’s two women now in the banking sector at least ‘high up’ to look at. Anne Heraty too resigned from her Director’s role at Anglo in January, but she came from a ‘recruitment’ background and that was her speciality it seems. Still ‘n all, is this all we can find? Gender balance ahoy…
Well, not to quibble too much, but as I understood it, the question wasn’t whether or not there are equal numbers of men and women in banking and construction – of course there aren’t.
If the question is whether the crazy decisions and bullish attitudes that caused the crisis are specifically “male” traits, then Bowler’s role in particular, suggests they are not.
Devil’s advocate moment. I too been pondering this and agree twas cocaine/testosterone fuelled madness. But!!!! From what I could see plenty of women also got caught up in it, screeching about handbags and shoes and having ‘SJP’ moments. True few held senior positions of power but women were willing participants in the bling fantasy years.
The Sex In The City kind of materialistic lunacy is something entirely different to securing cyclopean loans that were never even remotely realistic and were only ‘secure’ if the property market kept going up up and up like a weather balloon. Of course personal responsibility comes into it with regards to the national spending spree….but sure aren’t we all, Gulliver’s little people, still legally liable to pay this money back and/or account for it? Bank of Ireland are not giving me a 48% discount on my credit card bill from those days (that I am still paying off) but via NAMA that’s exactly what they get for their capricious debts. It’s incomparable.
Brilliant, its time women started bursting through the various glass ceilings and sort this mad world out, we dont start wars either!. And yes buying designer clothes and drinking cosmopolitans might have been shallow but it didn’t destroy the country.
The question is not whether we, the little people, male and female, have all been royally screwed because we have.
Issue I’m struggling with is whether we can assume women were completely blameless in the fiasco.
For every property developer there was a wife and/or girlfriend(s-s-s) being just as competitive and money-grabbing as their men or the men they hoped to ‘catch’.
Carissa, no-one is saying women are ‘blameless’ – that would be a fairly braindead argument. Rather I’m posing a simple question/observation: from the reams of invective and narrative all over the TV and newspapers in the past year, it struck me as very male, all the property developers who owe these massive sums discussed, were male, most of the bankers, etc. At the top levels of power and at the top levels of greed, this story is predominantly a male one. I am not looking at the sieving downwards of money in the same way as I wouldn’t if I was looking at major drug dealers and their empires (also male: or can you name one female gangland leader while we’re at it?) It is an observation. The issue (in the context of my blog) is not the wife of Joe Blogs who rang up for the €18 million loan over the phone, nabbing a designer handbag. Ireland now has the highest level of household debt relative to disposable income in the developed world at 190%. This is a much bigger issue on a different level entirely. The banks [combined] are faced with a capital shortfall of €32 billion….I am not looking at how we spent our money but how we lost it – two separate issues entirely.
[...] Here, some lady (possibly a neer-do-well) blames the fact that she can no longer afford her weekly jaunt to Brown Thomas on the fact that there were no ladies in charge during our Celtic Tiger! And here some lady blames the fact that she is currently unhappy with the shape of her bottom on some evil man somewhere! [...]
Indeed!
By the way,
You know what was behind the threat to the Irish banking system, don’t you?
That’s right, hysteria. The crisis can be traced to the disturbed uterus of the global financial markets.
From the Report to the Minister for Finance by the Governor of the Central Bank:
http://www.irishtimes.com/focus/2010/honohan-new/index.pdf
Personally,I find it unfair to say that men,as a gender, ruined Ireland. The blame does not lie in their Y chromosome,but rather the capitalist economic model they adhered to surely?
Mary Harney’s ruthless pursuit for privatisation of health care in Ireland has absolutely ruined the health system in this country,creating an unequal two tiered system that is heinous to work in, speaking as a health care professional. Her downfall has nothing to do with her gender but the drive for profits above all else?
Hi Chick, ta for commenting. I am not saying ‘men ruined Ireland’, I’m asking (very clearly) ‘where are the women names in this drama we’ve been hearing about since 2008′? It’s not a simplistic or black & white argument, rather that I was posing a question: I have heard nothing but men’s names since the start of this national unravelling. I am not an economist so do not have the indepth knowledge to know the answer, which is why I posed it, after researching back through the newspaper articles on the bust, I was surprised at the lack of women villians. I already mention Mary Harney above in the piece by the way, although we’re not discussing the health sector here, though I think our health system has been crap for a long long time, but the current state of ‘cuts and crisis’ is seriously chronic and Harney has a lot to answer for. I also mentioned one of the ex-Directors of Anglo, who was a woman, in the piece. Aside from them, I couldn’t find any more female names, I’m being absolutely honest. I have not heard, to date, of ANY female property developers who borrowed and now owe (you know, the ones we’re paying for) multi-million euro sums and neither have I heard of female bankers who dished out these enormous cash amounts. It’s a question posed, whether it’s fair or not. During the Celtic Tiger years I went on a fair few property press trips for various papers and couldn’t quite take in these enormous projects that were taking place, by Irish developers, around the globe. I travelled all over and in the last while was interested to find that ‘some’ of these ventures have gone awry and in at least two cases, the agent provocateurs have done a runner from Ireland leavnig massive debts behind. It just struck me that they were all men and I’m really just asking myself, out loud, why is that? The piece is an invitation to find out more rather than an attempt at economic analysis. Hugh: thanks for the info you provided, especially the report link, amazing stuff! Language is a funny business is it not? I especially love the NAMA discounts being referred to as ‘hair cuts’ as well. Makes it all sound a little more innocuous, harmless.
Thanks for the reply June. Yes, I agree, its an interesting question to ponder over and one that should be addressed, as surely the inequality of our business world had some part to play in its spectacular collapse.
A curious spin on the “witch hunt” trend in Irish journalism these days, where the writer, presumably with the benefit of hindsight, seeks to identify either individuals or sectors of our society where we can all conveniently lay blame for the supposed “disaster” that has fallen the (once again) plain people of Ireland.
A few observations:
1) The public relations industry is composed predominately of women. These supposedly blameless women are as equally guilty as any conspicuous male capitalist of creating the ludicrous lifestyle hysteria that has now inevitably collapsed. The fact that these people have been largely successful in making sure they don’t become the story does not mean they do not exist.
2) The same can be said for the majority of journalists in our national newspapers, many of whom are contributors to this very website. I do not remember very many scathing stories about the Celtic Folly getting printed during the boom years – what I remember is stories about must-have lifestyle accessories and how it’s never been a better time to buy your dream home in Dublin.
3) To misquote a familiar maxim: for every vapid man, there’s an equally vapid woman. The convenient image may be that of the Sex and the City wannabe – which so many of the Irish middle-classes are now hurriedly distancing themselves from – but the fact remains, the Irish property bubble was about far more than a handful of pantomime individuals taking out grotesque loans. It was about an entire generation of greedy people living beyond their means; horrendous people desperate to get on the property ladder, and then renting out their hideous one bedroom box apartments at extortionate prices to finance their monthly trips to Manhattan. To attempt to absolve women from this collective madness simply because there are few women making the headlines strikes me as disingenuous.
Howdee cohenhand/Vandala, ta for your lenghty comment and analysis. Unfortunately, it still doesn’t answer my initial question but you do raise some good points. In particuar with regard to the epidemic of greed that gripped the nation and the senseless materialism that seemed to infect just about everyone, in every industry sector. I remained broke as a freelancer throughout the boom, with a hideously high ‘shared ownership’ mortgage that became unmanageable so I had to sell. How we ‘spent’ our money I’m in agreement with you, how we ‘lost’ it is down to the cockology of [predominently male] banking management who made such criminal decisions backed up by a [predominently male] government. I am not laying the blame on one gender here, rather that I’m stating an observation. The pantomime individuals were almost all exclusively male property developers with a bloated sense of self and purpose. I know this because I went on numerous property press trips throughout this time, to write about these ‘amazing opportunities’ for several Irish newspapers and met the men who bought up whole islands (like in the case of Cape Verde) or whole glitzy glass blocks in Dubai, without a cent or ‘real’ capital at all. Many too were unashamed to admit that they secured their loans on the golf course (and over the phone) with bankers they’d been introduced to in the boy’s club, and so on. I can’t let it go unsaid.
June,
Fair enough. I understand the distinction you’re making between “spending” and “losing”.
But I suspect you already know the answer to the question you’re posing in the first place: women are conspicuous by their absence because of the supposed “glass ceiling” in the corporate and finance sector which apparently still prevents women from accessing jobs in senior managerial positions.
Which is convenient, I guess, because they can now stand – in your eyes, at least – blameless.
Your analysis begs a more interesting question. Do you think if there had been women in these roles that they would have behaved any differently? Are you trying to suggest that women would have behaved more sensibly, more ethically? That women are somehow instinctively nicer than men? Less ruthless? Less arrogant? Less smug?
If that’s your subtext, I think you’re on shaky ground and, from a personal point of view, it certainly wasn’t my experience of the comely Celtic Tiger maidens brandishing their credit cards at the crossroads. In my mind, the spiked stiletto is as much, if not more, a symbol of corporate greed as the “cloth arrow pointing to his wotsit”.
An interesting article, regardless.
Not at all am I suggesting women are ‘blameless’ by their absence. This again is an assumption you’re making because I’ve decided to look at this in a certain singular way by asking: ‘where are the women at the highest levels of power who share responsibility for the crisis we find ourselves in’. I’ve also said, continuously, that this post is not an indepth analysis, just a wry observation. That is the beauty of a blog compared to a news feature. I am not an economist nor a business journalist, but I do have an interest in what’s happened, given that I did go on so many property trips back in the boom days and even then I often expressed what I saw happening as not making any sense. I would love to give you ‘specifics’ here, but cannot for reasons of libel, etc. It was blatantly obvious that the paper money on which these [particularly forgeign] property investments were being made, had no back-up at all in reality. A Mayo farmer with a small dairy farm, buying up a quarter of a multi-million euro office block in Dubai, a man who owned a bicycle shop in rural Ireland snapping up a series of golf villas in Cape Verde, a retired post office worker getting massive bank loans to buy a new apartment ‘block’ (a whole block) in Malta. These were trips I was sent on to cover for newspapers. Incidentally, I was asking the same question in reverse during the good times, while on these trips: ‘how come none of the major investors and developers are women?’ I didn’t have the head eaten off me then for asking that, I was generally laughed at, as if the suggestion itself was so ludicrous it didn’t warrant a serious answer. Of course I am not saying that if 50% of the wanker bankers were women we wouldn’t be in this dire financial state now. But we will never know, will we? What I am saying is that in general there are not enough women at the highest levels of power or even in government (13% in the Dail and about to fall lower again). Therefore women did not share the thrill of decision making in the good times or the burden of disaster in the bad. I can’t care if that sounds sensationalist to some men out there. Compared to other EU countries, I feel skeptical and I suppose unassured that I am not represented fairly at the highest levels of power, but am over-represented at the lowest, which is much more shaky ground all being said than jibes about stilletoes and credit card happy women spending their husband’s bloated wages. How would you feel if your government was made up of 87% women and virtually 90% + of every upper management role in the land was taken up by a woman? It’d be a bit like a Planet of the Apes experience for you no doubt. Misogyny is so ingrained in our society that even in the furore following this massive senseless ecomomic crash, I can be branded silly (or even worse: semi-hysterical!) for posing one simple question or even stating the obvious. The entire picture, as a whole, is depressing.
I’m not going to argue with you – I think we’re broadly in agreement.
And, for the record, I did find life in Ireland over the last 10 years very much a “Planet of the Apes” experience. That had nothing to do with gender – it had to do with all the b*llsh*t being spouted by a certain class of person, obsessed by flaunting their material wealth.
All that I’m saying is – greed is greed. And power, or more accurately, the illusion of power, corrupts regardless of whether you’re a man or a woman.
I agree with you! The constant harping on about ‘doing up the house’, buying second homes, buying holiday apartments (not good enough to just go on holiday all of a sudden), etc., was totally bonkers. A fiscal flu. Really got on my nerves too and was shocking to see how easily people got sucked in and lost. I hope we learn from it. As far as I can see, people have fallen down to earth a tad, are re-learning the value of money, seeing how they over-spent and are vowing not to heed the hype, should it ever come around again in the way that it did. It’s astonishing how we lost the run of ourselves. I cannot see how Ireland can ever reinvent itself to the same bloated level again. Personal responsibility on all sides was lacking, and yet this was also encouraged by the powers that be. A hideous situation altogether.
[...] This post were originally posted on the Anti Room blog on August 1st, 2010. To read the comments click here [...]