Other than that . . . silence. It’s more than three years since the Irish government foisted the losses of the Irish banks on the Irish people, and in that time there have been only two conspicuous acts of Irish social unrest. In early 2009, at AIB’s first shareholder meeting after the collapse, a senior citizen hurled rotten eggs at the bank’s executives. And late one night in September 2010, a property developer from Galway named Joe McNamara painted his cement mixer with anti-banker slogans, climbed inside the cab, drove across the country, and, after locking its brakes and disabling the release, stalled the machine between the gates of the Parliament. The elderly egg-thrower was a distant memory, but McNamara was still, more or less, in the news: declining requests for interviews. “Joe is a private person,” his lawyer told me. “Joe feels like he’s made his point. He doesn’t want any media attention.”
Before he’d parked his cement mixer in the Parliament’s driveway, McNamara had been a small-time builder. He’d started out laying foundations, and, like a lot of tradesmen from the sticks, he’d been given a loan by Anglo Irish Bank. Thus began his career as a property developer. He’d moved to Galway, into a tacky new development beside a golf course, but the source of his financial distress lay an hour or so beyond the city, in a resort hotel he’d tried to build in the tiny village in which he’d gown up, called Keel, on a remote island called Achill. “Achill,” says Ian, after I tell him that’s where I’d like him to drive me, then goes silent for a minute, as if giving me time to reconsider. “This time of year Achill’s going to be fairly bleak.” He thinks another minute. “Mind you, in the summer it can be fairly bleak as well.”
It’s twilight as we roll across the tiny bridge and onto the island. On either side of the snaking single-lane road, peat bogs stretch as far as the eye can see. The feel is less “tourist destination” than “end of the earth.” (“The next stop is Newfoundland,” says Ian.) The Achill Head Hotel—Joe’s first venture, still run by his ex-wife—was closed and dark. But there, smack in the middle of the tiny village of his hometown of Keel, was the source of all of Joe McNamara’s financial troubles: a giant black hole, surrounded by bulldozers and materials. He’d set out in 2005 to build a modest one-story hotel with twelve rooms. In April 2006, with the Irish property market exploding, he’d expanded his ambition and applied for permission to build a multistory luxury hotel. At exactly that moment, the market turned. “We went away in June of 2006,” Ronan O’ Driscoll, the Savills broker, told me. “We came back in September and everything had just stopped. How does everyone decide at once that it is time to stop—that it’s become mad?”
For the past four years the hotel site had scarred the village. But it wasn’t until May 2010 that Anglo Irish Bank, which had lent McNamara the money to develop it, threatened to force him into receivership. Irish bankruptcy laws were not designed for spectacular failure, perhaps because the people who wrote them never imagined spectacular success. When a bank forces an Irish person into receivership, it follows up with a letter to his blood relations, informing them of his insolvency—and his shame. A notice of the bankruptcy is published in one national and one local newspaper. For as many as twelve years the Irish bankrupt is not permitted to take out a loan for more than 650 euros, or to own assets amounting to more than 3,100 euros, or to travel abroad without government permission. For twelve years part of what he earns may pass directly to his creditors. “It’s not like the United States, where being bankrupt is almost a badge of honor,” says Patrick White, of the Irish Property Council. “Here you are effectively disbarred from commercial life.”
There is an ancient rule of financial life—if you owe the bank 5 million bucks, the bank owns you, but if you owe the bank 5 billion bucks, you own the bank—that newly applies to Ireland. The debts of Ireland’s big property developers—defined as anyone who owed the bank more than 20 million euros—are now being worked out behind closed doors. In exchange for helping the government to manage or liquidate their real estate portfolios, the biggest failures have been spared bankruptcy. Smaller developers, like McNamara, are in a far harder place; and while no one seems to know how many of these people exist, the number is clearly big. Ireland’s National Asset Management Agency controls roughly 80 billion euros’ worth of commercial property loans. An Irish property expert named Peter Bacon, who advised NAMA when it was created, recently revealed that when he’d added up the smaller Irish property-related loans (those under 20 million euros), they amounted to another 80 billion euros. Some very large number of former Irish tradesmen are in exactly Joe McNamara’s situation. Some very large number of Irish homeowners are in something very like it.
The difference between McNamara and everyone else is that he’d complained about it, publicly. But then, apparently, had genuinely thought better of it. I’d tracked down and phoned his ex-wife, who just laughed and told me to get lost. I finally reached McNamara himself, ambushing him on his cell phone. But he only muttered something about not wanting to draw further attention to himself, then hung up. It was only after I texted him to say I was en route to his hometown that he became sufficiently aroused to communicate. “What are you doing in Keel????” he hollered by text message, more than once. “Tell me Why are you going to Keel???” Then, once again, he fell silent. “The problem with the Irish people,” Ian says, as we drive away from the black hole that bankrupted Joe McNamara, “is that you can push them and push them and push them. But when they break they go wacko.” (A month later, after a period of silence, McNamara would reappear, screaming from the top of a building crane that he had driven across the country and ditched, once again, in front of the Parliament.)
TWO THINGS STRIKE every Irish person when he comes to America, Irish friends tell me: the vastness of the country, and the seemingly endless desire of its people to talk about their personal problems. Two things strike an American when he comes to Ireland: how small it is, and how tight-lipped. An Irish person with a personal problem takes it into a hole with him, like a squirrel with a nut before winter. He tortures himself and sometimes his loved ones, too. What he doesn’t do, if he has suffered some reversal, is vent about it to the outside world. The famous Irish gift of gab is a cover for all the things they aren’t telling you.
So far as I could see, by November 10, 2010, the population of Irish people willing to make a stink about what has happened to them had been reduced to one: the egg-thrower. The next day we pull up outside his home, a modest old row house on the outskirts of Dublin. The cheery elderly gentleman who opens the door in a neat burgundy sweater and well-pressed slacks has, among his other qualities, fantastically good manners. He has the ability to seem pleased even when total strangers ring his doorbell, and to make them feel welcome. On the table in Gary Keogh’s small and tidy dining room is a book, created by his grandchildren, dated May 2009. Granddad’s Eggcellent Adventure, it is called.