To Catch A Whale

If you are an Influential Business Person or IBP as the banks put it, they will write off your debt rather than incur the wrath of your rich VBFs—your very best friends. Allied Irish Bank has told us so, explaining why it cancelled Charlie Haughey's overdraft. AIB was afraid that some of CH's VBFs would switch their business to another bank, in protest, and CH's VBFs, as we know, had a lot more money than CH—they used to give our poor, mendicant Taoiseach the change out of their back pockets.

AIB was right and all. Better to sacrifice a million than lose a billion in the long term. AIB knew perfectly well what it was doing—it set a sprat to catch a whale. Taoiseach Charlie had the confidence of the business community and it was just a matter of time till the sprat brought the whale on board. Charlie was good for the country, the country was good for business, business was good for the bank. AIB is now the richest bank in Ireland.

I was a sprat myself once, so I know. I used to write a column for The Irish Times called "In The Eyes Of The Law". It was all about how some buck-ignorant District Justices in the lower courts at the Bridewell maltreated petty criminals and social derelicts who appeared before them—often without legal representation, because there was no Free Legal Aid in the early '70s. The column was a roaring success, especially among the snobbish upper ranks of the judiciary, judges and barristers alike, who deplored, my dears, the absence of both law and justice in the lower ranks. The legal officer class, who operated from the intellectual, cushy splendour of the Four Courts looked down upon the sergeants and corporals in the trenches—the district judges and prosecuting solicitors who fought hand to hand with the natives in the trenches.

The liberal Irish Times and its liberal readers loved the column too. Many an eye was wiped, many a morning, in sympathy with the poor. The paper's prestige rose on the backs of the column's defence of them. One day, I fell foul of a District Judge. He sued for libel on a technicality, which I wanted the paper to fight. The IT's legal adviser took me across to Bewley's for tea and sticky buns to explain realpolitik to me. It would be bad for IT business to fight a libel suit against a member of the judiciary, however humble he was. In such a case, the judiciary would close ranks, with consequent loss to the IT of the IPs—influential people.

Besides which, District Justice Robert Ó hUadhaigh was really a nice fellow, a personal friend of de Vere White, and the paper had allowed me to pound him for years. Deservedly, de Vere hastened to point out, but Ó hUadhaigh was getting on in years, was soon to retire and it would be gracious to allow him one small victory over my column—a technical knock-out, of course, nothing more, but some recompense for the huge gulf I had shown between Ó hUadhaigh's grasp of law and his understanding of justice, and the consequent disregard in which he was held by his peers. He had often lapsed in law also, I pointed out. An apology, no money required, de Vere had been assured in an old boy's conversation with Ó hUadhaigh.

I refused, editor Fergus Pyle published an apology anyway, I resigned, my union did fuck all, and I returned to the paper after a fortnight's huff. Like the other union members who did not want to lose pay or jobs over me, I didn't want to lose a job either. Naturally, I was paid for my two weeks' absence.

I asked to be switched to the High Court and Supreme Court, where the doings of their Lordships, the barristers, the white-collar criminals, the business classes and such important groups as the medical profession had not been adequately scrutinised. More cups of tea were taken in Bewley's. Unlike my current column, it was explained, which dealt with lower-court hearings that lasted on average ten minutes, allowing readers a daily beginning, middle and end, including judgement and jail sentence, the new column I proposed could take months before a conclusion was reached in my case.

And, crucially, unlike the lower class of accused person, it was possible that the rich and powerful people upon whom I proposed to cast a beady eye would injunct or sue the paper at the drop of a hat. (The lower classes did not usually read the paper and those who did could not afford to take a libel suit.)

Nor did the paper want to take on the judiciary, or the builders, or the doctors, or any of its ABC reading classes. The paper did not rely on income from sales—it attracted less than eighty thousand readers then—but on income from advertising which was aimed at ABC readers who had more to spend than the combined blue-collar readers of all other papers. If the IT's ABCs were to read another paper, in protest against the IT's exposes of their legal shenanigans, the paper would lose lotsa money.

And IT journalists would lose jobs.

And so I never did get posted to the higher courts. And that's how the system worked then.

It's different now, in the new climate of egalitarian Ireland. Sure, who doesn't despise lawyers? And what lawyers don't despise judges? And which judges don't despise lawyers? Go to the Tribunals and have a laugh as the legal eagles tear lumps out of each other. And an even bigger laugh as the business class and politicians rip each other's intestines out in front of the judges and lawyers, assuming they can find a judge and lawyer who can bear to address each other.

Sure it's better value than the lower courts. And The Irish Times devotes pages and teams of journalists to it, on a daily basis. And the lawyers and judges get paid anyway, and the accused classes won't lose more than pocket money because the real profit is well stashed away offshore. And those who haven't come to the attention of the Tribunals laugh all the way to the laughing banks. Those guys—the real criminals and their VBFs whose doings in the Four Courts continue to escape scrutiny—haven't gone away, you know. They are well protected by punitive libel laws against which newspapers (with one eye on advertising bread and butter) have scarcely raised a whimper of protest.