The former Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern said that the quick and easy loans from financial institutions. He claims the availability of loands led to the financial meltdown and the recessions was primarily due to ordinary people getting too many loands and basically too big for their boots.
The life long politician said during an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that “everybody started living on credit” during the boom years.
Speaking to broadcaster John Humphrys said:
“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.”
“So Joe Soap and Mary Soap, who never had a lot, got the loans for the second house and leveraged the third house off the second house and the fourth on the third, and you know, what are you having yourself. So that was a huge problem. But where did that problem come from? That problem came from the availability, which we had never had since the foundation of the state, of cheap money through the European system.”
Sinn Féin TD Peadar Tóibín said about the former Taoiseach’s comments:
“What is even more peculiar is that in the banking inquiry Bertie told the committee that: ‘I mean, look what happened in the commercial property side. I mean, there was where the madness really took place.’
So unless Joe and Mary Soap are developers he seems to have changed his story.
“This is a typical Fianna Fáil approach of trying to diminish the disastrous role they played in the crash by shifting the blame onto the average family who bought a mortgage.
Joe and Mary Soap did not cause the collapse of the economy under Fianna Fáil and no amount of revisionism by Bertie Ahern or Micheál Martin can change that.
‘Nonsense’
When Ahern appeared before the banking inquiry last July, Ahern apologised for the mistakes his Fianna Fail government during his 11 year tenure, but he insisted that he got “a lot of things right”.
He said at the time:
“Of course, I apologise for my mistakes, but I am also pleased that I did get a lot of things right.
He told the inquiry that he wished he could have foreseen the crisis, remarking: “If hindsight was foresight, I’d be a billionaire.