Ciarán Hancock
speaker
1,838 appearances
14 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 2d ago
Ciarán Hancock’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 14 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 3.
Appearances
In a hard-hitting column this week, John McManus posed the question as to how Michael Fingleton got away with it for so long.
This is in relation to Fingleton's stewardship of Irish Nationwide Building Society over nearly four decades, until it collapsed in 2009, being bailed out by Irish taxpayers to the tune of 5.4 billion euro.
John joined me in studio and I began by asking him to explain why he thinks Michael Fingleton got away with it.
Now, you also said that this was happening in front of our eyes, essentially, this ramping up of the commercial lending activity at Irish Nationwide, which eventually, when the crash came in 2008, it blew up and
Suddenly it had billions of bad loans on its books and had to be bailed out by the station.
There was a lot of gnashing of teeth went on at that stage.
Some people might say, John, that, you know, you were a business correspondent and editor for a part of that time.
How come you never noticed that?
So he joined Irish Nationwide, it wasn't Irish Nationwide at the time, it was Irish Industrial Business Society in 1971.
It was kind of a sleepy organisation, mutual, I guess, kind of like a credit union, almost doing small personal lending and loans, mortgages, etc.
to teachers and the like.
He was only 33 at the time when he joined.
And in 1973, he qualified as a barrister.
He never practiced and he had a head for figures and the knowledge of the law.
And that would come in handy as he began to grow the business.
And it seems he was a good networker.
And he eventually grew Irish Nationwide into a much more substantial, it was kind of like a credit union almost, wasn't it, when he joined?
And it became a much more substantial lender in terms of personal lending and mortgages and
He was lending to people, mortgages to people who maybe couldn't get a loan, a home loan at the time from a bank because maybe they weren't in regular work.
freelance journalists, I think, fell into that.
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