Madam, - I read with interest the edited version of a speech by Seán Fitzpatrick, chairman of Anglo Irish Bank, to The Irish Times's Property Advertising Awards (Opinion & Analysis, September 22nd).
Methinks the gentleman doth protest too much. While he lavishes praise on the "brightest and best of our school leavers", who put all their talents into making money, he is unhappy (no doubt on their behalf) that someone such as Eddie Hobbs was allowed ("completely unchecked", no less!) "four weeks of prime time television". It was approximately three hours, if I'm not mistaken.
He complains that "almost every stakeholder" in our "economic success" was "targeted" (Eddie's aim must have been pretty good). Mr Fitzpatrick seems oblivious that our TV programmes are interrupted every 15 minutes or so, for at least 12 hours of every day, to allow the "stakeholder" three or four minutes to target the householder. That must work out at around a thousand hours per year, per channel.
What upsets the "stakeholders" (the very word says it all, doesn't it?) is why Eddie Hobbs, who knows how to play the game, insists on counting his and everyone else's money while sitting at the table. The three-card trick merchants want him off the streets. He keeps finding the lady. What upsets them even more is the veil of respectability being whipped away.
It is ironic that Mr Fitzpatrick was addressing that particular pocket of the business sector, property advertising. Early in his speech he mentioned "hope for our young and educated". Our young and educated in particular, despite their jobs, cars, credit cards, etc, are brought to their knees when trying to buy a house and bring up a family. While I don't lay the blame for this entirely at the feet of the people in the property market, I don't see them crying into their Ballygowan over it. (Why does that word "stakeholder" keep jumping out at me?)
In too many cases houses are not homes. Children are left with childminders (no disrespect to the childminders), having been called from their dreams far too early in the morning, so that both their parents can be gone all day to enable them to pay a ludicrous mortgage on a three-bedroom semi that cost at least twice as much as it should.
What are the social consequences? Are they already evident? This is where the "brightest and the best" should be turning their attention, not towards easy opportunism.
I wonder if another Seán Fitzpatrick, with his obvious abilities, and another group of young people, with another set of values, might have the "ideas" and the "balls" (his words) to rid us of this social evil, and still show a profit. Now that would be what I would call an "economic success".
If this cannot be achieved, my one-word summation of Mr Fitzpatrick's speech is in there somewhere in my second last sentence. - Yours, etc,
HUGH DESMOND,
Rathdown Park,
Greystones,
Co Wicklow.