Ground Floor: Scandals in the Irish banking industry were in the news before I took a break and they're still in the news on my return - even if the bank concerned is different.

It has been impossible to avoid the in-depth coverage afforded to the National Irish Bank (NIB) investigation, which shed more light onto murky practices within the industry. The final report spells out tax evasion and indiscriminate overcharging issues and paints a damning portrait of Irish banking in the 1980s and 1990s.

It's very difficult, as someone who worked in the industry during that period, not to feel that in my memory of those days has been tainted by the revelations.

In my case, things were somewhat different since, working in the dealing room, I didn't have much contact with either commercial or private customers of the bank. My business relationships, and those of my colleagues, were mainly with other banks. There were corporate and high-net- worth relationships too, but they diminished as the needs of the particular banks I worked with changed. For us, dealing with overseas banks in the swaps market became more important and corporate loans were more valuable than deposits.

Nevertheless, the Irish pound deposit market - as it was then - would always have been an integral part of any bank's business.

There is no doubt that during the 1980s and 1990s the issue of DIRT on deposits was a major one. In the case of financial institutions themselves, DIRT was not levied and that's why it was not of particular concern to anyone in the dealing room.

However, our corporate customers did often ask us about DIRT-free products. I feel particularly naïve at this point in saying that we simply shrugged and told them that it wasn't possible for Irish residents. Some of our customers told us that they could get better deals elsewhere. As wholesale bankers, corporate deposits weren't a primary source of funding, so we would let those depositors go, even though the credit department would sometimes call to ask why we'd lost deposit business from a credit customer.

We did sometimes wonder how they were getting better deals; we often laughed over the fact that, if someone was paying them over the odds, or offering a service which we couldn't offer, it was probably too good to be true in the long term.

It was, of course. Rather interestingly, though, the focus of discussion regarding NIB and tax evasion has been that the bank badly advised customers and is liable for Revenue payments. But when the Government was making strong statements about tax compliance and customers still availed of products designed to "hide" money from the taxman, they must surely accept part of the blame.

While individual customers with relatively small amounts of money may feel aggrieved at the advice, there were, at the time, plenty of customers with greater sums demanding DIRT-free products. And they knew that they were available somewhere.

Interestingly, in scooping money from depositors who should have been in the DIRT regime, and giving them a poor return for their money (although hiding it from the Revenue was seen as worth it), NIB was also operating at an unfair advantage over other banks in the system.

If you didn't offer a customer a DIRT-free package and they walked away with their deposit, you had to find the money elsewhere, sometimes at a higher rate of interest. If branches of other banks were seeing their depositors disappear, what impact was that having on profitability as well as morale and careers?

Meanwhile the other aspect of the report - into arbitrary charging of customers depending on how much of a nuisance they had been - is fairly incredible. Not necessarily because of the concept, simply its execution. After all, don't auditors and solicitors charge on the basis of billable hours? If you were a customer who took up a lot of bank time, why shouldn't you be charged for it? It was the fact that the charging was arbitrary and added on as interest that beggars belief.

The whole thing is yet another shabby chapter in the history of Irish banking. The capitalist curse of profit above all else seems to have pervaded our mindset so much that "right" and "proper" have become quaint oddities for "fools" and "suckers".

A less shocking banking story has also been in the news with the takeover bid for Abbey National by Spain's largest bank, Santander Central Hispano. The difficulty in concluding this deal lies in the fact that almost a third of the bank is owned by private shareholders who got their stake when the former building society demutualised.

Institutional investors - the other shareholders - are looking for something a little better than the initial offer, although Abbey has been a poor performer of late and most of them think it could do better under different ownership. But the task of persuading British private investors to own shares in a company listed on the Madrid stock exchange rather than the Footsie isn't easy. And that's despite the fact that nearly a million Brits have already invested in Spain already by buying homes there!