John Burns
speaker
307 appearances
11 recordings
4 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 6 Aug
John Burns’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 — 11 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 9.
Appearances
And I was turned on by banks for mortgages myself back in those days.
So what would happen is they would inevitably end up in Michael Fingleton's office and they would say, give us a loan, Michael.
And even though they would have no savings record with Irish Nation, which we were supposed to have, even though they probably were bad risks, he would say, yeah, fine, you can have a loan.
Now, it worked well on two levels for Michael Fingleton.
One, in a sense, the journalist was going to be in their debt to some extent.
You know, it'd be hard to write something horrible about a guy who's just given you a mortgage like that when everybody else turns you down.
But secondly...
he charged them over the rate.
So if the ordinary rate was, say, 10%, he was going to charge you 12%, which was the levy on the fact that you weren't able to get this money anywhere else.
So he was a hard-headed commercial businessman as well.
But he certainly bought an awful lot of favour with senior journalists in big newspapers, not a million miles from here.
And his picture would regularly appear in...
in those newspapers under favourable headlines with a little bong mot, a little quip from Michael or whatever.
And yet, I mean, there was just zero scrutiny of what was happening in Irish nationwide right up until the very end.
So how does it begin to all fall down?
Like, obviously the money runs out.
But again, in terms of people paying more attention to this and the big fall, bring us forward to that.
Well, it all fell down at the same time.
So the governments guaranteed the banks and the banks went totally bust.
So the guarantee was called in.
Showing 181–200 of 307 · page 10 of 16
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