NEW YORK BOSTON |#Popular: Irish Celebrity Gossip Irish Pubs Irish Festivals Irish Roots Irish Entertainment Offbeat Irish

Home Page > Blogs > News blogs > Periscope > Prime Minister’s golf and dinner with Ireland’s untouchable ---- Sean FitzPatrick secret meeting last straw for many party faithful

Periscope by Niall O'Dowd

Prime Minister’s golf and dinner with Ireland’s untouchable ---- Sean FitzPatrick secret meeting last straw for many party faithful

Posted on Thursday, January 13, 2011 at 11:39 AM

Larger Text

E-mail

4 Comments

RSS

Archives

In the end it may come down to a round of golf with an untouchable if Brian Cowen is replaced as Ireland’s leader over the next week.

Despite emerging from a party meeting with his job still intact, the circle is closing on Cowen's leadership

Brian Cowen had weathered every storm imaginable in his tenure as Prime Minster, the country going broke, IMF/EU intervention, dreadfully harsh budgets.

He saw his government’s popularity collapse to the point where his party , which won 44 per cent of the vote last time might have to settle for 14 per cent this time.

Even the weather seemed to conspire with the two coldest winters for decades and then there was the volcanic ash cloud that shut down Irish airspace for weeks.

But when he was directly linked to Sean Fitzpatrick, the former head of Anglo Irish Bank which collapsed leaving the Irish taxpayer with a $50 billion bill, he was suddenly very vulnerable.

The meeting took place over a golf game and dinner at a fancy country club outside Dublin in July 2008.

Fitzpatrick revealed the meeting in an interview for a new book and it linked Cowen fatally to the man considered the poster boy for Ireland’s plunge into darkness.

It subsequently transpired the two men had dinner with a few others immediately afterwards.

At the time Anglo was coming apart at the seams and the Celtic Tiger was gasping.

Yet Cowen, implausibly, stated that he and FitzPatrick never discussed the bank or the need for the subsequent bailout either on the golf course or at the subesquent dinner.

It sounded a little like asking Mrs Lincoln how she liked the play.

When the news of the contact broke some despairing Fianna Fail members saw it as the final insult, the moment when Cowen’s greatest asset, his integrity and honesty suddenly came under fire.

The Irish taxpayer is footing the $50 billion dollar Anglo bill, by far the largest of the massive bank debts they have to subsume.

The bailout of Anglo was deeply resented from the beginning with many experts believing the government would have been better to let it go to the wall.

Did the cozy golf game and dinner have anything to do with the agreement to bailout? No one knows for sure but the suspicion had taken hold that Cowen was not telling the whole truth.

That was the last prop holding him up, his reputation as decent and honorable with no hint of skullduggery in his dealings.

When that fell his demise became very possible despite his Houdini act at his party meeting on Thursday

It is not how he would want to go, a man who inherited much of the mess from his predecessor Bertie Ahern.

But nonetheless it may become inevitable.

E-mail

4 Comments

See all comments

generationb | Jan 15, 2011, 12:18 PM EST

WELL! WHY ARE WE NOT SURPRISED.... WHEN ARE WE GOING TO WAKE UP TO WHATS REALLY AFOOT AND BECOME ONCE AGAIN AND INDEPENDENT STATE AND PROUD OF IT! JUST MAKES ME SICK TO SEE THESE GUYS GET AWAY WITH SUCH CRIMMINAL ACTIVITY WITHOUT A WHISPER FROM THE PEOPLE. WHERE ARE THE YOUNG GENERATION? ALL THE POLITICIANS NEED TO BE OUTED AS THEY DON'T SERVE THE PEOPLE JUST THEIR OWN POCKETS.

Report abuse

irishcoffeekid | Jan 14, 2011, 10:36 AM EST

I still say you'd be better off to put 10 irish housewives who have experience in managing tight budgets into the government along with a small town accountant and the country would be better off that these jokers ruining everything for everyone. I've watched my sisters paychecks get smaller and her lifestyle diminish because these fat useless idiots we call politicians can't work their way out of a paper bag! Its way past time for change in Ireland! Young people don't want to emigrate and leave their families but if you cant get a job or experience in your home country, you go elsewhere - the government should be ashamed of themselves and should apologise to the Irish people for the horrendous damage they have done - they're an embarrassment to the country and to those of us watching this from abroad - SHAME ON YOU COWEN!

Report abuse

jacersagain | Jan 13, 2011, 05:41 PM EST

Oh it’s inevitable alright but not right now or especially on the account of a game of golf and dinner afterwards – it’ll be something else, methinks. Cowen, like Enda Kenny, is a fighter. Nobody calls Enda Kenny a liar to his face; nobody has yet stood up to Cowen’s face either and said he’s a liar. Both men are known for their honesty and integrity. Kenny however, is a master of innuendo, like Eamonn Gilmore and his sidekick Joan Burton and Sinn Fein’s Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin, Gerry Adams man in the Dáil. I won’t bother mentioning Press journalists in Ireland who are viciously “innuendous” about anyone in or with power of any kind – political, religious, monetary etc - just so long as they get a headline on the Front Sheets and however they make up the story that we Irish are expected to swallow up.

Report abuse

GeorgeDillon | Jan 13, 2011, 02:31 PM EST

Everyone I know in Ireland hates Briancowen. Most of his enemies hate Brian Cowen, and even his friends despise him. Don't be taken in by Cowen's supporters on this site, posters like sirpeter aka antoman. They (well actually they're the same person) speak for nobody but himself.

Report abuse