The Rusty Wire Service

With losses of €17.7bn, Anglo-Irish Bank today posted the largest corporate losses in the history of the state. The announcement came ahead of the Irish Central Bank's release of forensic stress tests which are expected to expose losses across other Irish banks, including Allied Irish Banks (AIB), Bank of Ireland, Irish Life and Permanent (IL&P) and the EBS building society. So far, Anglo-Irish alone is understood to have cost the Irish taxpayer around €30bn. Anglo’s former chief executive, David Drumm, will also face questions today and tomorrow in connection with debts claimed by the stricken bank and his declaration of bankruptcy in Massachusetts. Stress testing is expected to reveal that 44,000, or 5.7% of homeowners, are at least three months behind with their mortgages. And the value of these arrears? A staggering €8.6bn. Based on an assessment of the ‘worst case scenario’, stress-testing is designed to ascertain whether or not the banks can withstand a par...

"Don't make us ask you again Mr Murphy, how many people are living in your house?" It’s that time of the decade again folks. That time when your government sees fit to ask all sorts of intrusive questions about your life and personal circumstances. But we put up with it because apparently it’s for the greater good, right? Whose greater good that might turn out to be however, is an altogether thornier proposition... In the UK, there has been a proactive government campaign to promote this massive national stock-take. The BBC has clearly been pressed into service, and dutiful Auntie has been promoting the census diligently; casually in talk shows and also by running a series of documentaries on the centenary of the 1911 Census. And natch, we all filled out our forms last Sunday like good little beancounters. Elephant in the room Over the water in Ireland, it’s also Census year. And, confirmed sceptic that I am, I find it kinda life-affirming that on both sid...

Silvio lost the toss for the Tito Jackson uniform   Police around the Mediterranean are on high alert after reports that a rogue plastic surgeon has been extorting vast amounts of money from vain and foolish old men in return for appallingly shoddy cosmetic procedures.  (see right) “We are asking the general public to be vigilant but like a lot of con artists, this ‘surgeon’ has a type or mark and we would ask in particular that men of a certain age, with more money than sense, be on the lookout for sharp practitioners, ” said an Interpol spokesperson yesterday. Close friends Muammar and Silvio (pictured)  are two hapless victims of this unscrupulous conman. Muammar (94), who has run a family firm in North Africa since 1969, was not available for comment as his business fights off a hostile takeover. It is not clear in any event that his pronouncements would have been comprehensible, owing to the severity of his 'trout pout'. Fun-loving Silvio (...

Roger Casement (1864-1916) was a British consul by profession, well known for his reports and activities against human rights abuses in the Congo. He was imprisoned at the Tower and executed at HMP Pentonville in London for treason in August 1916, following the Easter Rising against British rule in Ireland earlier that year. This is the speech he made after his conviction on 29 June. "My Lord Chief Justice, as I wish my words to reach a much wider audience than I see before me here, I intend to read all that I propose to say. What I shall read now is something I wrote more than twenty days ago. I may say, my lord, at once, that I protest against the jurisdiction of this court in my case on this charge, and the argument, that I am now going to read, is addressed not to this court, but to my own countrymen. There is an objection, possibly not good in law, but surely good on moral grounds, against the application to me here of this old English statute, 565 years old, that ...

Wee Timmy: Mini P (O'Neill)   A boy in Norn Iron has apologised for the controversy that ensued after he posted a picture of himself on social networking site brandishing an AK47 and wearing a ski mask. Wee Timmy McTaig (nine and a half) from Che Guevara Road, Crossmaglen told reporters at an undisclosed location that he really regretted his decision to be photographed in such a compromising pose. “There’s no way I’d ever be snapped like that again,” vowed a rueful Wee Timmy. “For starters, I should have been wearing gloves and had my jacket cuffs taped up...”

Freewheelin' Franklin sez: "Ken Clarke is the man!" In the same month that POTUS Obama renewed his commitment to the War on Drugs in Latin America, the British establishment is starting to openly question the winability of such a war. On 21 March it was reported that “leading peers – including prominent Tories – say that despite governments worldwide drawing up tough laws against dealers and users over the past 50 years, illegal drugs have become more accessible.” And this isn’t just some crank MPs in the Palace of Westminster looking for an eye-catching crusade. These  MPs and members of the House of Lords include former heads of MI5 and the Crown Prosecution Service. They are part of a recently formed All-Party Parliamentary Group on Drug Policy Reform and these unlikely advocates of Freak Power are calling for new policies to be drawn up on the basis of scientific evidence. It probably won’t come as a surprise to some readers that this writer mig...

In a considered piece for the Dublin Times , Olivia O’Leary this weekend pays almost fulsome tribute to the Irish poet and Noble Laureate Seamus Heaney.  So, I guess you could call this brief: “What I learned from what Olivia O’Leary learned from Seamus Heaney”. It’s tragic however that the lessons Ms O’Leary learnt about the intimacy and ambiguity of The Troubles were not more widespread among the established Mexican media. The reporting of the Northern conflict in the South throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s was, by and large,  a pantomime of ignorance, mystification and worse; obfuscation. It’s little wonder therefore that most people in the Free State had little understanding of day-to-day life refracted through the opaque banality of anodyne pleasantries and murderous conspiracy. All those whining Northern Republicans who ever told you that you had to live there to understand it, well sadly, they were probably right. Over the decades in the banana republic of ...

Q. What’s got a hundred legs and twenty teeth? A. The prison methadone queue. That riddle was posed to me not long after I first came to HMP XXXX, but until I went one day to the prison’s healthcare department, I didn’t really get the black humour of it. I didn’t know what to expect when I first came to prison. I was put on a wing with hundreds of violent petty-to-career criminals. To be frank, I was absolutely petrified and my sphincter twitched like a rabbit’s nose on that first wing walk. All my fears about lag life, all the convict stereotypes; with every step I took, they were being confirmed in spades. All those stories about gang culture, violence, drugs and bent screws, believe me, they’re not myths. And this was to be reality of my life for the foreseeable future. Paddy Hill of the Birmingham Six describes prisons as ‘human dustbins’ and he’s not far wrong. Perhaps the biggest issue in prison life is drugs and their constant supply. Not surprisingly, heroin is...

Mervyn King Governor of the Bank of England Mervyn King this weekend stopped short of calling the banking class ‘socially useless’; unlike his peer Lord Turner UK over   at the Financial Services Authority, who in 2009, famously questioned the inherent value of the banking class to society. King, who took over from Eddie George in Threadneedle Street in 2003, warned the Daily Telegraph on Saturday (5 March) that Britain risks another financial crisis unless it undertakes fundamental reform of the banking sector. Short-termism and a failure to develop relationships sound like a checklist of sociopathic behaviour but apparently, they are also failings of the British banking system. (Who’d have thunk it?) King compares the approach of what he describes as traditional businesses which had a more "moral" way of operating. Benevolent patriarchy? Now, I’m prepared to overlook King’s absurdly out of touch comments; when was he last in the marketplace looking for work? ...

Cosy meetings in comfy houses tucked away in the Oxfordshire countryside: blind eyes being turned to past editorial indiscretions; a cast of venal kingmakers, amoral   bag-men and unctuous politicians....Welcome to the News Corp-Tory Party nexus. We don’t have need to go into great detail on the Country Living particulars; we just need to know that on 3 March, Culture Secretary Jeremy (‘Berkshire’) Hunt, green-lighted Murdoch's News Corporation plan to takeover BSkyB. The proposed deal went through after News Corp undertook to spin off Sky News into a new independent company. The upshot of it all is, that if the deal went through, Murdoch would still hold a sizeable minority holding in Sky News. A ten year ban on News Corp buying back in and an independent chairman are being offered as laughable fig leaves to spare the blushes of the competition watchdog. 'Disastrous'  Media Regulator Ofcom has pronounced itself pleased that News Corp has "agreed to place editorial ...