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
So the loans were only worth 28% of what had been given out.
There was a very good example of it, that Fingalton had given a 170 million euro loan to a businessman to develop a hotel in South Dublin.
And when NAMA basically valued the hotel two years later, it was worth 55 million.
So you give a 170 million euro loan to do up a hotel that's worth 55 million.
That again just illustrates the bonkers nature of it.
Look, we are talking about a man who has passed away recently and passed away surrounded by his loved ones.
But nonetheless, this must come under scrutiny even now.
And I just find myself wondering, was he just a chancer?
Was he just a spoofer?
Because there's a great story that you kind of have in your piece as well, where back in his Biafra days, he apparently had 100 grand in a suitcase for bail money for someone and talked his way through the security.
Was he just a silver-tongued devil who was able to just talk people into these jaw-dropping amounts of money passing hands?
Oh, he was.
And that's a story that he used to tell himself, that during that terrible civil war, basically all the Irish priests and nuns were rounded up by the Nigerian government because they were on the other side of the war.
And they were charged with things like...
illegal entry into the country but they were locked up in this in this horrible jail and um fingers uh claimed that he had flown in got stopped by a security guard at the airport his suitcase opened and inside was a hundred thousand punts 127 000 euros in everyday language and normally i don't think you you would get past the security guard with a suitcase having that um amount of loot but somehow he did a very different time the 1970s though let's be fair
But you've hit on a good point there, because someone said that to me today, someone of my generation said that someone like Fingleton would not be in Irish business today.
They wouldn't survive.
You know, the board would basically shut them down really quickly.
Certainly the regulator would.
And that's a point that I have made.
Showing 141–160 of 307 · page 8 of 16
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