Wrong In Every Way Possible

WRONG: Sean Fitzpatrick

An Irish banker, who has overseen the value of his company slump by 90 per cent, hid a loan of €87 million in a rival financial institution every year for eight years.
And, he says, he did nothing wrong.
Now, whether or not what he did broke the law or not - and if it didn’t then it is the law is sadly lacking - he certainly did something wrong.
Morally wrong.
Ethically wrong.
In fact, what he did was wrong in almost every way imaginable.

This is the guy who said, before the budget, that we should all feel some pain because of the economic situation, a situation his bank, and the world’s banks, created.
Now, he’s all sorry.
Sorry, that is, that he has been caught in his subterfuge, sorry his deceit has been uncovered. sorry he’s been rumbled.
But will it make any difference to him?
Not a jot.
Will he suffer?
Not a bit of it.
Will he now know what it’s like to be poor?
Not a snowball’s chance in hell.
Because these people, people like Sean Fitzpatrick, don’t inhabit the same planet as the rest of us.
They life on planet greed. They are - still - disciples of the “Greed is Good’ God of Gordon Gecko.
We all were, to a degree.
We were paying €3 or more for a coffee on the way into work in the morning. And we didn’t think it too much.
We were paying €5 for a pint and not complaining.
We were jumping taxis for trips of less than a kilometre, paying for movie channels and never watching them, buying gadgets we didn’t need and never used, buying ‘labels’ to wear at exorbitant prices when equivalent clothes cost less than half the price, we were buying ‘exotic’ foodstuffs and learning to like them, we were buying wine by the price - because we assumed that if it was expensive it was good.
On that subject, a man I know who works in the wine department of a supermarket, told me that they often price lousy wine, wine they know won’t shift at €5.99, at between €10 and €15 because people who know nothing about wine buy in that range assuming what they’re buying is ok.
Anyway, we fuelled bastards like Fitzpatrick by pandering to our own egos.
Crap artists sold for sums vastly above what they were worth, because people paid what galleries asked.
We paid €100 or more to see gigs in lousy venues.
We bought cars with gizmos we didn’t need.
We bought pricey furniture because we wanted to show off.
We wasted our money.
And now, it’s all over.
I, like many others, have to take a pay cut.
But I have a job.
Which makes me lucky.
Sean Fitzpatrick currently doesn’t have a job.
But he still has money. More money that you and I would have if we won the lottery.
Won it twice a week for a month.
Because that’s how unfair it all is.
That’s the way of it.
The bad guys win.
And we pay the price.