Joe and Mary Soap won’t be happy.
Former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern has been relatively quiet since leaving office over 7 years ago as the former Fianna Fail leader has become one of the most vilified figures in Irish society.
In a rare interview with BBC Radio 4, Ahern has blamed “Joe Soap and Mary Soap” for sending Ireland into a recession after claiming that the financial crisis happened because anyone could walk into a financial institution and claim a loan.
Ahern was a guest on the radio station where he was talking about the prospect of the EU collapsing but his views on the Irish recession are far more interesting.
He said “everybody started living on credit and credit was whatever you wanted yourself. Anyone could walk into any institution and seem to get any amount of money and this is where the cocky bit came in. Unfortunately, collectively as a country, we started leveraging one off the next.
The former Taoiseach maintains that “Joe Soap and Mary Soap, who never had a lot, got the loans for the second house and leveraged the third house off the second house and the fourth on the third, and you know, what are you having yourself.
“So that was a huge problem. But where did that problem come from? That problem came from the availability, which we had never had since the foundation of the state, of cheap money through the European system.”
Ahern stood down as Taoiseach just four months before the €440 billion bank guarantee came into existence in September under the watch of his replacement Brian Cowen and the late Finance Minister Brian Lenihan.
As we all know, the infamous IMF bailout of over €85 billion occurred just two years later.
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