Former Taoiseach and Fianna Fáil leader Bertie Ahern has claimed that the Irish people along with Irish banks were to blame for the country’s downfall during the boom years.
Mr Ahern said main cause for Ireland’s collapse in recent years was the continuous availability of loans which left “everybody willing to live on credit”. The former Taoiseach’s brash comments come as he recently spoke in an interview with BBC Radio 4′s Today programme, in which the programme examined whether the European Union might collapse in the near future. Mr Ahern told veteran broadcaster John Humphrys, the biggest problem was the availability of cheap credit through Ireland’s involvement in the eurozone. Mr Ahern further explained: “Everybody started living on credit and credit was whatever you wanted yourself.”
“Anyone could walk into any institution and seem to get any amount of money and this is where the cocky bit came in. Unfortunately, collectively as a country, we started leveraging one off the next.” Mr Ahern went onto heavily criticise the country’s banks by saying they were willing to give money to every Joe Soap and Mary Soap, who never had a lot, to purchase second homes which they used to leverage the third house off the second house and the fourth on the third. Ahern said that specific problem purely came from the availability, which we had never ever had since the foundation of the state, of cheap money through the European system.”