Scannal (the excellent sub-titled part-As Gaelige documentary show on RTE One) was – in an amazingly perfect event of ironic timing – about the Insurance Corporation of Ireland last night.
ICI was a significant subsidiary of AIB which collapsed in 1985. The taxpayer bailed out AIB. It eventually cost us IR£400m, a massive figure at the time.
Find last night’s programme in the archive here.
It was a story of lax regulation and greedy banking policies which led to a massive hit on the taxpayer that threatened to pull down “the sovereign”. It’s one of the major events in AIB’s “colourful history” referred to earlier on this blog.
Now, time for some Shirley Bassey…
“They say the next big thing is here,
That the revolution’s near,
But to me it seems quite clear,
That it’s all just a little bit of history repeating”
It all sounds too familiar!
At the time of the ICI ‘rescue’ it had been estimated that the company’s total liabilities were approximately IR£50 million. In a revelation that is all too familiar, it was only later that the true picture emerged when the High Court-appointed administrator (Billy McCann) reported that the liabilities actually totalled IR£226 million.
It’s shocking (and puts the current bailout figures etc into frightening context) that as recently as 2008, over €11 million was paid out to the old ICI company from the Insurance Compensation Fund (collected from ordinary Irish people with insurance policies), even though it went into administration in 1985…
At the end of 2008, according to the annual Insurance Green Book, the Fund was still owed over €358 million by ‘companies under administration’ – €208 million by ICI (Icarom plc) and €150 million by PMPA (Primor plc)!
If we’re still paying for these bailouts from so many years ago the mind boggles as to the repayment period we’re looking at for this EU-IMF bailout!