Madam, – “Golfgate” is turning into an exercise of pinning the political blame for the blanket bank guarantee onto the Cowen/FitzPatrick donkey. In part, this arises because there appears to be confusion as to who actually recommended the blanket guarantee to the Government in September 2008.
I’m perplexed by this apparent confusion because the origin of the plan has been hiding in plain view for over two years now, although its economist author has been uncharacteristically reticent about claiming the credit for it. Following a midnight meeting between David McWilliams and Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan on September 17th 2008, McWilliams published an article advocating the blanket bank guarantee in the Sunday Business Post of September 28th, 2008.
In that article Mr McWilliams stated “The only option is to guarantee 100 per cent of all depositors/creditors in the Irish banking system. This guarantee does not extend to shareholders who will have to live with the losses they have suffered. However, it applies to everyone else.”
It seems logical to assume the content of this post-meeting press article accurately reflects the advice given to Mr Lenihan on the night.
Two days after publication of that article, the Government announced it was implementing a blanket bank guarantee, along the lines proposed in the McWilliams article. As recommended by Mr McWilliams, the only exclusion from the blanket guarantee was to be the shareholders.
It’s high time the media gave Mr McWilliams the credit he deserves for this strategy, at a time when many of the public are clamouring for him to launch his own political movement to sort out the mess the country is in. It would also seem prudent to bear this 2008 proposal in mind when we read the ever-growing menu of Mr McWilliams’s solutions for getting the country back on track! – Yours, etc,