Biffona Biffona not quite out of denial stage

DÁIL SKETCH:"THIS IS dead money, in a dead bank, in a black hole." No, it's not Enda doing his Monty Python impression, just stating the obvious.

Although you had to laugh.

Twenty two billion euro up in smoke.

Dearly departed, like a deceased parrot in a dead parrot sketch. Beautiful plumage had Anglo in its day. But everyone knows it’s an ex-bank now, even if the Taoiseach has nailed it to its perch and continues to feed it billions upon billions of our money.

That cash is never coming back. Like Python’s parrot, it’s joined the bleedin’ choir invisible.

The chief executive of the bank, Mike Aynsley, confirmed this sad truth to an Oireachtas committee last week.

Biffo is taking the news badly. He’s not quite out of the denial stage yet. Nice people that they are, Enda Kenny and Eamon Gilmore did their best to help him come to terms with the loss.

Admit that the money is gone, they wheedled.

Accept that we’ll never see the bulk of it again.

And maybe we might even get a small bit of it back?

But yesterday afternoon, while a sparkling Bafana Bafana were joyously dispatching France in Bloemfontein, a sluggish Biffona Biffona in Leinster House was doing everything in his power to avoid answering a simple question: is the money gone or not? Of course it’s gone. The man from Anglo admitted it. But it took four attempts to drag the admission from Brian Cowen.

The new Enda (he’s had more promised improvements than a box of Surf) was a revelation. Actually, he wasn’t. But he wore a very decisive emerald green tie, hardly rambled at all and stuck to just the one question about the lost €22 billion.

It’s dead money, isn’t it? The amount that is being spent on Anglo could be far better invested in improving infrastructure and creating jobs, the reconstituted Fine Gael leader argued.

“Forget the shorter picture here” (ructions among the Blueshirts) “and look at the longer picture” (next taoiseach) he urged Biffo. There could be forty thousand jobs in his way of doing things, and then we’d have no problems with bad banks and international bondholders and the like.

Biffona Biffona was in a sour mood. He mumbled about subordinated debt and buyback arrangements and funding requirements and immediate liquidation.

Pouring scorn on Inda’s grasp of matters economic while nipping in with a sliding tackle on recent events in Fine Gael, he sneered: “If you select the finance spokesperson as quickly as possible, all the better for your own outfit.”

Over in South Africa, that would have been an immediate red card for Biffona Biffona. He never answered Enda’s question about the fate of the €22 billion.

So Eamon Gilmore gave it a go. Biffo waffled. Like the dead parrot, the dead billions were simply resting.

At least the Taoiseach didn’t say the money was “pinin’ for the fjiords”.

The Labour leader had one final bash at it. “That’s your third go now to talk yourself around what is a very simple question.”

What about the words of Mike Aynsley, chief executive of Anglo? That money has shuffled off the mortal coil.

“Is that man right or is he wrong? Is our money gone? The twenty two thousand million that has gone into Anglo Irish Bank: is it lost and gone forever?” Biffona Biffona threw a few more shapes, but eventually he caved in.

“That money is never going to be returned.” Which is where we came in with Enda. This is dead money, in a dead bank, in a black hole.

After last week’s madness, an exhausted Leinster House was more than happy to embrace a dead (if expensive) parrot.