Peter McConnell gets a Mouthful Back.

John Fitzpatrick

Doon Heights

Ballyconnell

Co Cavan

4^th July 2014

Dear Editor,

Peter McConnell (Letters 03/07/14) shares his “humble opinion” that the Quinn family have no moral right to take their case against the Irish State.  He further opines that if they win “it will be the greatest travesty of justice that the world has ever witnessed”.  This is not only nonsense, it is nonsense on stilts.  Perhaps Mr McConnell would like to reflect on some of the happenings in the world in his own life time; the Guilford Four, the Birmingham Six were real travesties of justice.  A good dose of proportion and reality would seem to be needed in by this man from Bailieborough.

To start with I, along with many others in this part of the county would regard it as a vindication of the Quinn family’s rights legally and morally if and when they win their case.  Again Mr McConnell’s hyperbole outruns the facts when he says that had Sean Quinn’s investment in Anglo worked out Quinn would be “by a long stretch, the richest man in the world.”  Really, Mr. McConnell?  Richer than Donald Trump, richer than Warren Buffet?  Yes he would have gotten richer and probably also been hailed as the wisest man since King Solomon.  Or as your scribe from Baileborough put it he would have been proved to be “the shrewdest, cutest, and best informed businessman this country has ever produced.”  Unfortunately that is not what happened and your letter writer’s capacity for swallowing one narrative for the reasons why displays a worrying tendency to seek an easy scapegoat in the form of Sean Quinn and his family.

Mr. McConnell does return from the edge of reason when he lays most of the blame at the door of the Financial Regulator (and we might add the politicians who allowed the light touch regime to operate).  Unfortunately he quickly topples over the edge of reason when he begins to question the jobs created in Ireland as a whole.  Is west Cavan, south Fermanagh and south Leitrim not worthy to be counted as part of Ireland as a whole?  Sean Quinn took on the vested interests in cement, insurance and glass and turned a forgotten part of Ireland into an industrial hub.  Does Mr McConnell forget that it was Sean Quinn who saved the health insurance jobs in Clonmel when Bupa was about to pull out of the Irish market?  Did he never hear of the quarry in Williamstown in Galway which provided employment in the west of Ireland and has since been closed down by the enlightened geniuses of the present management team?  What of the pubs, hotels and sundry other businesses all over the country which provided gainful employment for hundreds if not thousands of people, obviating the need for the plane or the boat?

As for Mr McConnell’s risible claim that Ireland’s woes, including our loss of economic sovereignty, are all down to Sean Quinn, well it is precisely that, risible.  I need hardly remind him that we do still live in a parliamentary democracy governed by the rule of law.  In that context it was the elected government of this country who chose to place such a smothering burden of debt on the shoulders of Irish men and Irish women.  Sean Quinn said if he was given seven years he would repay every last penny he owed.  He would have been well on the way to doing that if he had been given the chance.  The State, through its various organs, said no and will have to live with the consequences.

No, Mr McConnell, your easy scapegoating of one man and his family does not wash with me, and I believe as the truth comes dropping slow from the courts and from other sources it will not wash with the majority of fair mined Irish people.

As for Sean Quinn and his family still having a roof over their heads and a few bob in their trousers, well this just smacks of that all too familiar and ugly Irish trait of begrudgery.  In this case as in all cases, Mr McConnell only one dictum need apply: “Fiat iustitia ruat caelum” – Let justice be done though the heavens fall!

Yours sincerely,

John Fitzpatrick