Charlie McCreevy didn’t give evidence to the banking inquiry. Instead, he held forth, at considerable length, about his own brilliance.
It was a stunning performance. Even in Leinster House, where the corridors are wider to accommodate all the inflated egos, the former minister for finance was in a class of his own.
It’s no wonder he never twigged the economy was overheating or wondered if his actions while in office might have been a major cause of the problem.
How could the inquiry have expected Charlie to recognise a dangerous property bubble? He clearly has a problem with bubbles.
This quickly became apparent when everyone realised McCreevy was pontificating at the increasingly exasperated TDs and Senators from inside a large bubble of personal delusion, and he was the only one who couldn’t see it.
“I’ll just give you a minute to settle and make yourself comfortable,” said inquiry chairman Ciaran Lynch before proceedings started.
Lynch needn’t have bothered. Comfort was never going to be an issue. According to the latest figures, McCreevy earned over €460k in State pension payments over the past four years.
Also, the man who presided over the Irish economy in the crucial years leading up to its collapse has an extraordinarily high opinion of himself.
Charlie McCreevy was so comfortable on Wednesday he was lucky somebody didn’t cover him in chintz and turn him into a Chesterfield suite.
He certainly got up the committee’s nose.
It would have saved everyone a lot of time and exasperation if Brian Cowen's predecessor in the Department of Finance had come in and sang Sinatra's My Way to the assembled politicians and media. Regrets? Had he a few? Not really. Too few to mention. "I contend we were the most responsible government in the history of the State," he declared.
McCreevy was minister for finance between June 26th, 1997 and September 29th, 2004. We can be very precise with these dates because it’s one of the facts he had no difficulty supplying. He loudly called out the dates when asked how long he had the job.
The gist of what he had to say to the inquiry was this: “I had nothing to do with the subsequent implosion of the Irish economy and banking collapse.
“I didn’t know anything was going to go wrong. I stand by all my budget decisions. I regret nothing. I did nothing wrong.
“There is no reason to apologise. Everything was wonderful when I was in charge. Damnit, I was wonderful.”
It wasn’t long before he incurred the wrath of Sinn Féin’s Pearse Doherty. Charlie didn’t like his line of questioning.
For example, did Charlie not heed the repeated warnings from the Central Bank about the economy overheating? “With hindsight, should you have been more cautious with your spending policy and budgets?” The answer was an emphatic “No.” Sure the country was flying.
“The proof of the economic pudding is in the eating,” he added. As for a property bubble, there wasn’t one in his time.
Waffle
What about after he left for Europe? Was there a property bubble then? McCreevy refused to answer. He waffled about himself and what he could have said over the years but didn’t (despite people begging to do books and he was “sorely tempted” to spill the beans).
Again and again, Doherty tried to get a simple answer to a simple question. Did McCreevy believe there was a property bubble in the years after he left Irish politics?
“I’m not going to break the edict I put on myself,” [not to comment on stuff which occurred outside his ministerial term], was McCreevy’s pompous reply.
Finally, after an adjournment to acquaint the witness with his legal obligations, the chairman returned and read the witness his rights.
Grudgingly, Charlie responded. “In that particular sense you could call it, I suppose, a bubble.”
Then there were the people of influence he was supposed to have met while minister – high rollers in the property world. He couldn’t remember meeting them, “but if it’s in my diary I have no problem with that”.
Ciaran O’Donnell was interested because McCreevy pledged in his 2002 budget to abolish major tax breaks for development projects, and changed his mind after he was “bombarded with requests” to “revisit the policy”.
Why did he change the rule? After another adjournment, he said he could not remember the rationale, but it must have been good.
Susan O’Keefe also wondered why would these developers want to meet him in 2003? “Well, they must have come in to see me about something,” said Charlie. “I don’t know.”
Former secretary of the Department of Finance, Kevin Cardiff, gave evidence that McCreevy was one of the people of influence who contacted him to suggest it might be time to introduce a bank guarantee, in April 2008.
“I have no recollection of the meeting or the conversation,” the former minister said.
However, McCreevy, who was an EU commissioner at the time, said that living abroad and following events back home with his fellow expats, “we were very concerned as Irish people as to what was happening”.
He probably suggested that the government “should make a broad statement”. He was only giving his view “as a concerned Irish citizen who used to be in the Department of Finance”.
Did he make decisions with elections in mind, asked Eoghan Murphy. “When you make it to government,” he condescended, “you’ll want to make decisions which don’t antagonise the voters. We are politicians, don’t forget, and we actually like to get re-elected.”
‘Responsible’
“Sorry?” gasped young Murphy, aghast. “Is that a responsible way to run the national finances?”
Perhaps he should ask his own boss and Minister for Finance as they get Fine Gael on a general election footing.
Decentralisation, Charlie? A failure? Definitely not. A resounding success, from inside McCreevy’s bubble.
As for the SSIA scheme, was this an attempt to buy an election? “I’m very pleased you brought that up,” started the smug former commissioner, before waffling on about how fantastic the savings scheme was.
McCreevy must have been taking lessons from Pee Flynn. On and on he went about the wonderful works he had wrought.
When it came to Fianna Fáil, perhaps he might get a more sympathetic hearing. As it was, he complained, nobody was giving him credit for rebuilding the economy and pumping billions into it. (Before it burst.)
Michael McGrath was inclined to entertain his fantasy. “In your time as minister for finance, did you get anything wrong?” Eh, no.
Could he have done better? Not really.
In a rare flash of humility, McCreevy regretted he couldn’t apologise for himself, if that’s what McGrath wanted. He could only do that if he did something really wrong, and he didn’t. “I have no regrets.”
What a guy.
