Sympathy for the Devil

I’ve been feeling a bit queasy reading the newspapers recently. We are in the shit right now: there’s no getting away from that. But that doesn’t mean that we have to find a bunch of scapegoats, throw tomatoes at them, take their possessions away and threaten to string them up. But that’s effectively what’s been happening. It is, I have to say, deeply unedifying.

Maybe I’m a bit odd. In fact, I probably am. But once people start ganging up on an individual I begin to have sympathy for the guy who is in the firing line. I don’t like mobs. And I like lynch mobs even less. Which is why I felt a strange and unexpected sort of twinge when I read that the one-time State-owned bank ACC had seized a car from the property developer Paddy Kelly.
Don’t get me wrong. I know a few people in the rock’n’roll business who were in on deals with Paddy Kelly and they don’t have a lot of positive stuff to say about the experience. I’m sure that on occasion, over the past few decades, he upset friend and foe alike.
But I still felt that he came across relatively decently in the interview with Fintan O’Toole for the Irish Times a few weeks back. A self-made man, he was blunt but essentially straightforward. Reading the article, you could understand what it all meant to him; against the odds, he communicated a genuine sense of pride in the work that he had done.
Is there something inherently wrong with being a developer? For many, ‘property developer’ has become a term of abuse. But where does that leave the likes of Mick Wallace and Harry Crosby both of whom are, in distinct ways, cut from a different cloth than the common perception of developers? And there are others like them – essentially decent people who found themselves in a particular space, trying to earn a living out of building things, over the past decade.
Of course there are abundant reasons for Irish people to be sceptical about anyone involved in development, planning and building – to do with the culture of brown envelopes, bribery and corruption that was allowed to fester here for so long. But there is a Rorschach aspect to all of that.
I tend to the view that it was the politicians and planners, the ones who held the levers of power and patronage, and who abused that position, who were most culpable in creating the climate where favours were bought from public servants of one kind or another. Did developers want to have to part with money? Did they like greasing the wheel? The answer is no and no again. More often than not they felt they had to, and so they did.
The truth is that without developers, cities would atrophy. They may have a bad name – but good developers, and especially ones who use great architects, contribute hugely to the vitality of any place. To ensure that what they do works – that it is properly designed, built to spec, made to last and enhances the cityscape – is the responsibility of local government, and of the planners and the regulators. But whatever way you cut it, the role of developers is a critically important one. No matter what happens now, who made or lost money, or how long it takes us to recover from the collapse of the economy, the extraordinary changes that have been wrought in Dublin, east of the IFSC, on both sides of the River Liffey, will stand as a testament to what can be achieved when developers are on a roll. The place has been transformed.
Listening to Paddy Kelly, you had a sense of what it might mean to him, or to others like him, to identify a property or an area, imagine what would make sense there, plan it and take it finally from that initial vision through to completion. Even if the primary aim is to make money, this is not a small thing to achieve and it is what drives the growth and development of a city. Without a doubt, we have had monstrosities foisted on us. And the behaviour of builders and developers is rightly notorious on so many levels. But when it is done properly, when it is done with honour, it is, literally, monumental.
So who was most at fault, Paddy Kelly or Anglo Irish Bank, who lent him vast sums of money? People trot the names out now, as if they were dirt. Bernard McNamara, Paddy Kelly, Sean Mulryan, Sean Dunne and so on. They might be eminently dislikable people for all I know. Then again they might not. More likely, they and the rest of the developer names being bandied about are a bunch of blokes just like any other bunch of blokes: a combination of the good, the bad and the ugly.
Either way, these guys were taking the risks, signing up to personal guarantees. However misguided their decisions may have proven to be in the long run, they were prepared to answer the old imperative: put your money where your mouth is. Whereas the guys behind the desks in the banks were putting the shareholders’ and the depositors’ money at risk. (And, as it turned out, they were ultimately putting the taxpayers’ money at risk too). At no stage did they have to give money to the property developers. But not only did they give the money when it was sought, on many occasions they called developers up and inveigled them into deals which it suited the banks to do.
This is not an apologia for those people who went mad, or for the culture of excessive risk-taking, or for anyone who is out to make a shitload of money and damn the consequences. But it is an attempt to understand just a little bit better what actually happened. And to recognise too something that came across in the interview with Paddy Kelly: a lot of these guys had a background as hard-working Joe Soaps, who were cute enough to get into the game, rode the wave and found themselves at the top of it, at just the wrong time.
It is a business in which a streak of ruthlessness is usually considered essential. Some Irish developers have done terrible things, for sure. Including, in some cases, and I am not being melodramatic here, committing suicide when the full extent of their exposure emerged after the collapse of the banks and the resulting crash in property values. And so…
There was an odd note in the interview with Paddy Kelly, where Fintan O’Toole gave the impression that he was surprised that the developer was still driving a Series 7 BMW despite the fact that a lot of his debts had been taken into NAMA. The car was said to have cost €120,000.
But it was – or is – a 2003 car. You can pick one up now for about €12k. And even at that – is anyone buying? It’s hardly the height of indulgence. Either way, presumably as a response, last week the sheriff seized the BMW, as part of an attempt to collect the debt Paddy Kelly owes to the ACC.
A developer might seem like an odd case for sympathy. The country is littered with citizens who are broke. There are junkies begging on the streets, good people out of work through no fault of their own, families who can’t keep up their mortgage payments – all more deserving in their different ways. But it is still nauseating to see banks trying to make a point by hounding people for everything they have – when in fact the banks themselves are far more culpable in everything that has gone wrong than the people who borrowed money from them.
Is it all the fault of the developers? Is it all the fault of a few individuals? No it isn’t. The collapse of the Irish economy is to do with politics, and the policies that were pursued by Government over the past decade in particular. And it is a consequence of institutional failure. At the heart of the problem – to a far greater extent than any of the individual developers – were the banks, the regulators and the politicians who gave them their head.
That’s why I felt that unexpected twinge. There is an assumption that if the State and the banks can scapegoat the likes of Paddy Kelly and publicly humiliate them, it will somehow exonerate the institutions involved and the people who run them. Well, it won’t.
In the end, the sheriff had to apologise, acknowledge that the BMW belonged to Paddy Kelly’s wife and return the car.
I didn’t think I’d feel better when I read that follow-up story, but I did. Weird…