1/8
Yesterday at Leinster House for World Whistleblower Day, the conversations afterward turned powerfully to accountability, protections for those who speak out and the gaps that still exist in our institutions.
Follow up discussions quickly moved to the banking crisis of 2008 and its aftermath, very much ongoing today - & whether the full story of decision-making back then has ever been properly confronted.
Those exchanges prompted a closer look at key testimony from the Banking Inquiry that still feels unresolved today.
2/8
One striking piece came from former AIB Chairman Dermot Gleeson, who recalled the night of the blanket bank guarantee in September 2008.
Gleeson said Finance Minister - the late Brian Lenihan told him he was prepared to let Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Nationwide wind down.
Gleeson added that AIB viewed Irish Nationwide as irretrievably broken at that point, and he was surprised by how the broader guarantee unfolded without fuller input from some key players.
Crucially, when Anglo’s Sean Fitzpatrick publicly claimed that all banks were insolvent, Gleeson wrote to him describing those comments as “frankly outrageous”, insisting AIB did not see itself as having a solvency problem on that critical night - contrary to discussions in May 2019 in Finance Committee in which it is openly acknowledged that banks were insolvent.
3/8
Gleeson’s account painted a picture of AIB as somewhat sidelined from the final guarantee decision, learning the details largely through the media the next morning.
He maintained that the focus that evening was heavily on containing the risks from Anglo’s collapse and its potential ripple effects, rather than any immediate crisis of solvency at the larger pillar banks themselves.
This testimony left many wondering how much of the systemic picture was shared openly at the time versus managed behind closed doors.
4/8
That perspective sits in sharp contrast with evidence given a month later by Paul Dobey, the lead KPMG audit partner responsible for AIB at the time.
For the 2008 year-end audit, Dobey explained, the firm had very significant concerns about both liquidity and solvency at AIB.
The bank itself was forecasting substantial losses, and the audit team needed to be satisfied that AIB could continue as a going concern before signing off without qualification or an emphasis-of-matter paragraph.
5/8
To reach that conclusion, KPMG actively sought and obtained verbal assurances in early 2009 from the Financial Regulator, the Deputy Governor of the Central Bank on emergency liquidity assistance, and senior officials in the Department of Finance.
Those assurances confirmed that AIB would not be allowed to fail given its systemic importance and aligned with the Minister’s public statements of support. Dobey was clear that without this state backing — built on the foundation of the September 2008 blanket guarantee — the clean going-concern opinion would have been far more difficult, if not impossible, to deliver.
6/8
The two accounts together reveal real tensions.
Gleeson’s recollection emphasises AIB’s relative stability and pushes back strongly against any narrative that all banks were in the same boat, calling broad insolvency claims outrageous.
Yet the auditors working inside AIB saw material risks that required explicit government promises to certify the bank as viable.
This gap raises ongoing questions about what boards truly believed versus what detailed audit work and regulatory dialogues uncovered, and how those private assurances shaped public outcomes.
7/8
Fast forward to today and the contrast feels especially stark.
While the 2008 guarantee and subsequent state support propped up the banking system — enabling clean audits and continued operations for the pillar banks — we now continue to see aggressive enforcement actions by all the major banks and their delegates.
Debt collection, repossessions, and strict pursuit of arrears are proceeding with intensity against individuals and families - many who have been grossly overcharged and engineered into default.
So as the broader system was once insulated by political decisions and backstops - we now have an uncomfortable asymmetry between how institutions were protected then and how ordinary people are pursued now and it is hard to ignore.
8/8
Dobey’s evidence rings true in its description of the genuine solvency pressures auditors identified and the state assurances required to navigate them.
Yet it also throws up considerable questions about the suitability of the blanket guarantee itself.
By creating the conditions for what amounted to a form of “pretend solvency at AIB”, the bank guarantee appears to have allowed AIB to present itself as stable enough to pay dividends and award staff bonuses at a time when clearly those distributions should never have occurred.
If the underlying position only held because of political promises rather than real financial strength, then the guarantee did more than stabilise the system - it may have masked problems long enough for resources to flow out from banks such as AIB - in ways that later burdened taxpayers and significantly burdened ordinary customers - the effects are clear today despite the passage of time.
Events like yesterday’s at Leinster House underscore why whistleblowers and open scrutiny remain vital if we are ever to reckon fully with the choices that were made on our behalf and prevent similar “imbalances” in future.
A footnote: While I was awaiting for Senan Allen to commence review of my disclosures in the Summer of 2015; I was invited back to the Inquiry to conduct research on the lead up to the bank guarantee.
Within a few weeks, having declined the offer above, I was deemed “wholly unreliable” and unworthy of belief - even though I was not present.
Nevertheless, my name appears on the Final Inquiry Report along with other “absent Experts.”
The report contains evidence that corroborates my central disclosures, while simultaneously stating that there was no substance to any of my disclosures.
This tells readers all that is needed to be known about the reliability of the Inquiry Report - it is broadly a false narrative.
@stevemiddi1 @Wftproof @ArturNadol7566 @kenoflynnTD @JMcGuinnessTD
Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.
A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.