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 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 11 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 9.

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The Indo Daily · 'Baddie of the Bailout': How 'Fingers' Michael Fingleton built 'the world's worst bank' · 6 Aug 2026 podcast

And it was particularly active in a country called Biafra at the time.

We now know it as Nigeria.

And there was a particularly vicious civil war there in the early 1970s.

A lot of Irish priests and nuns were active there.

And he was involved in the centre of all that.

Yeah, you've described him as a paymaster general in the article that you wrote.

What exactly is that?

Well, I presume in modern parlance, it would be the chief financial officer.

I got that title from Maureen Caranduff's famous Who's Who book.

And that was produced in the late 1980s.

And of course, Fingalton was there.

It was pretty accurate and it often gave you detail that existed before people decided to change their image or their profiles.

And that was the title given in Who's Who in relation to Michael Fingalton.

But he wasn't there all that long.

And then in the mid 1970s, having got married and he and his wife had four children, but he got a job with a very small building society, if you want to call it that.

She literally had five employees, tiny offices on Grand Parade in Ranelagh, and he took it from there.

So is this reflective of society at the time or did he effectively decide, I'm going to turn this into a juggernaut?

I suppose only he can answer that.

But I think he must have decided, yeah, this is the perfect vehicle for me.

So it was called the Irish Industrial Building Society, which was not a very interesting name.

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