Sir, – In their informative article “Germany’s rethink on just where the blame lies for the Irish bank bailout” (Home News, March 27th) Derek Scally and Jochen Bittner write that senior Irish officials agree off the record that there was no legal alternative to the full blanket guarantee. The authors refer to one official as pointing out that 2008 Irish law gave bank depositors no preferential access to their savings over institutional investors (something that many critics of the guarantee apparently overlook).
Given the magnitude of the issues involved, could we now be told precisely what legislative wording was relied on to substantiate the government decision to bail out the institutional investors? Was the wording absolutely unambiguous, or was it perhaps subject to interpretation? And if the legislation was indeed closely constraining, precisely why – given the stakes involved – could the government not have changed the law at that point to differentiate between the rights of institutional investors on the one hand, and ordinary depositors on the other?
There may well be compelling legal arguments to explain the above situation, but I’ve never heard them made. – Yours, etc,
PAUL O’BRIEN,
Lamb Alley,
Dublin 8.