Yeah but if youâre a waste of space working in the public sector you will never lose your job so you can just keep lying around with your head up your hole barely understanding anything but judging everything.
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Ill have to take your word for that
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So we battled huge adversity and used our knowledge and street smarts to capitalise on any break we could 
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We did, but we took the piss. It was always going to be reined in eventually. We deprived poorer countries than ourselves latterly. We now have money falling out of the sky,which has ended up in 5quid lattes, 8 quid pints, unaffordable housing and 4x4s.
My pal doesnât observe people being any happier, but removing the forced emigration has been remarkable and you can only hope that this isnât a blip, whilst fearing that it is.
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Heâs IRFU historian now as well.
Corporation tax is double taxation.
Shrewd.
A bizarre take on intelligently managing policy.
The effective rate of CT is comparable in many other countries. The headline rates are higher but thereâs a fuck tonne of deductions.
Ireland got them here with the rate but that wonât keep anyone.
Irish subs of multis are generally star performers in their groups because the work force is hard working and well educated.
But itâs not ok for other people to have money.
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Fergal is of an age where he should be fully retired but a lot of these fellas have an ego that requires them to stay ârelevantâ. They convince themselves that they understand the secrets of the universe and they canât just shuffle off the fucking stage. They need to pass their wisdom to the next generation.
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Heâs with the IDA now.
The I
The I
The IDA
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Well said. Thick lads like myself are only dying to shuffle off to retirement if it were allowed.
@Julio_Geordio is already semi-retired sure
Feargal canât be much more than 60.
You know what they say, do a job thatâs easy and youâll never work a day in your life.
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Article from The Currency
In recent days, the special liquidators of Irish Bank Resolution Corporation (IBRC) handed over a further âŹ250 million of surplus cash to the Exchequer.
The payment brought total distributions in recent years to âŹ360 million. This is in addition to the âŹ1.7 billion received since IBRC was put into liquidation in 2013.
The disclosures were made by Paschal Donohoe, the finance minister, last week, when he published the eleventh annual progress update on the liquidation of IBRC.
Given the tumultuous world we live in and the fact that so much has happened over the past decade, it is easy to forget the significance of the liquidation of the bank, both economically and politically.
When you strip it all back, the liquidation helped Ireland regain its economic sovereignty to a degree that was previously unimaginable. It also revealed an unknown level of international investor demand for distressed Irish assets. It set the floor for distressed assets.
Consider this.
When the bank was liquidated on February 6, 2013, the government thought as little as 10 per cent of its âŹ21.7 billion loan book would be snapped up by cash-rich international buyers.
In the end, they bought all but 10 per cent.
It showed that Ireland, despite the countryâs financial collapse and external bailout, was not a complete disaster. Investors still wanted a piece of the action, albeit they acquired assets at knockdown prices.
In truth, the liquidation actually helped reduce the cost of borrowing and increased inward investment.
But it is worth remembering that the liquidation was central to a broader plan to restructure Irelandâs crippling national debt by staving off punitive interest payments on the cost of bailing out Anglo.
At the time, the decision to liquidate IBRC was still risky â even the European Central Bank believed there might have been an undiscovered âŹ7 billion black hole within IBRC at the time of liquidation.
A decade ago, I sat down with Michael Noonan, then the finance minister, to discuss the decision to liquidate the bank.
The way Noonan told it, the decision to liquidate the bank was down to the so-called âpromissory notesâ.
The prom notes, all âŹ30.7 billion of them, had been designed to bail out Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Nationwide.
They were essentially IOUs used to rescue both Anglo and Nationwide at the height of the banking crisis. But they had gone spectacularly wrong, exposing Ireland to âŹ3.1 billion in annual repayments.
Noonan needed to stop the payments â for the economy and for the country politically.
But it was impossible to stop the payments as IBRC had a banking licence.
âYou canât do what you want to do, minister, because itâs a bank,â several European officials told Noonan.
âBut what if itâs not a bank?â Noonan countered. âWhat if it had no banking licence?â
âI started figuring out how I could make sure it was not a bank, and liquidation sounded like a good idea,â Noonan told me.
So, he conjured up an idea to revoke the banking licence. This involved the liquidation.
Slowly, the idea caught on â both in Europe and Dublin. By October 2012, a select number of officials in Noonanâs department had drafted legislation that would liquidate Anglo Irish Bank overnight, thereby obsoleting its banking licence.
It turned out to be a masterstroke.
As part of the approach, Noonan secured agreement from his European counterparts to renegotiate the prom notes into long-term government bonds on which the principal did not have to be paid back for up to 40 years, thereby very significantly reducing the annual âŹ3.1 billion bill.
Meanwhile, Eamonn Richardson and Kieran Wallace and their team at KPMG had come up with a plan to liquidate a bank that had a loan book of âŹ21.7 billion within a matter of months.
âWe had to plan on a very high level,â Richardson later told me. âThere was no roadmap or plan for this kind of job, no real precedent. We do 25 fixed charge receiverships a week here. You know exactly what the challenges are and how you do the job. But there was no roadmap for IBRC.â
Eight members of the IBRC management team had their contracts terminated. The contracts of all the bankâs 1,000 staff were immediately terminated, before they were rehired on short-term contracts.
Before auctioning off the âŹ21.7 billion, the liquidators wanted to see what parts of it investors might be willing to buy.
Following the consultation with potential buyers, the liquidators broke up the mammoth loan book into six distinct classes. Each would be auctioned separately; many of those classes would be divided into a further 52 sub-lots.
The government had underwritten the liquidation, putting âŹ21.9 billion of bonds in the Central Bank to cover the process. If the proceeds were less, the taxpayer was on the hook to top up any further loss.
âIt would not have been our fault if the loans did not sell, but it would have been our responsibility,â Wallace later told me. âOur job was to get as close to repaying that facility as we could.â
All told, the liquidators had managed to sell 90 per cent of the entire âŹ21.7 billion loan book. Less than âŹ2 billion remained unsold at the end of the process, a staggering reversal of the initial estimates.
A decade ago, I asked Wallace if he knew why investor demand had risen so massively over the past year. âIt is hard to know,â he replied.
âBut when you put âŹ22.5 billion of loans out for sale at one time, in a strange way, you create your own market. You create your own interest, in retrospect, maybe there is a lesson to be learned that if you have something large to do, put it all out at one time and create your own market.â
The process turned out to be successful â politically and economically.
Last week, the progress update said that âfurther distributions will be made as the remaining assets are realisedâ.
âAt inception, the IBRC loan portfolio had a par value of âŹ21 billion. At the end of January 2025, that value stood at âŹ3.1 billion, representing a significant reduction in the overall loan portfolio,â said Donohoe. âI want to take this opportunity to formally acknowledge the exceptional progress made by the special liquidators of the IBRC in maximising the return on IBRCâs portfolio to date.â
The world has moved on from those dark days when the state had to liquidate a bank to avoid interest payments. But it is important to remember the lessons. The decision to liquidate took political bravery. It would have been easy to complain and keep paying the interest bills.
Noonan showed guts and guile. As we face an uncertain time again, there are lessons there.
Michael Noonan heâs not my avatar for nothing
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They actually fucked it as well because the idea was beautiful, but they rushed to sell off assets in a panic. The Irish state should currently hold a âŹ30bn+ property portfolio that would churn out money in perpetuity
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Well it would be carrying probably three times as much debt once they had built it all out so I donât know was it that simple
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It wasnât exactly Nobel prize winning innovation what they did either.
And donât forget NAMAwinelake and the popular discourse that we were sitting on even more losses just waiting to happen. âSure we have ghost estates!â Morgan Kelly was predicting a new collapse every other week after he got one rightâŚ
Iâm sure there is some property we should have retained for strategic infrastructure but itâs not like we have a shortage of State lands.
The old Hawkins House site owned by the OPW is sitting empty right now after being cleared. They have planning permission but looks like nothing is happening with it. Meanwhile the biggest office letting in Europe in 2025 just occurred with Workday. I guess they might just be waiting for the Metro to be build so it increases in value?!
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