Quinn Insurance in Administration

[haranguerer]

Thats the point - the questions being asked aren't the right ones in this whole affair.

They refused to try to come to a deal that would ensure everyone was paid. They went after quinn with an unnecessary viciousness. It should never have came to what it did, and its to the shame of the government that it did. At what point should he be stopped being victimised? Its an attempt to run him into the ground, its far beyond trying to get the money recovered, and everyone can see that.

Also, that isnt a distinction without a difference at all. Are all political refugees for eg  proclaiming themselves to be above the law? (for example I said, not a comparison, before you jump on it gleefully)

[boojangles]

http://m.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2012/0804/1224321434497.html?via=mostread

Nation's malaise visible in venom flung at Quinn

Saturday, August 4, 2012
MICHAEL HARDING
The Irish are angry but also psychotically ill. Why else target a man who really did his best?
SO NO doubt I'm wrong about Seán Quinn. He has been sneaking around Cavan General Hospital stealing the incubators in the maternity unit and digging his greasy fingers in the moneybox in Barnardos.
At least that's the impression I get from Fintan O'Toole's neat equations about how this giant of industry has been carrying on. A man who I mistakenly thought had spent 40 years developing factories in Cavan and Fermanagh, with fewer grants than Fás would find for coffee breaks. And in counties which, up to recent years got precious little from Free State, semi-State or the wobbly British state except decades of ridicule for being so poor that they ate their dinners out of drawers.
Apparently Quinn was not a man trying to generate jobs at all in that depressed area. He was actually oppressing the people all around him. It's funny how we get things wrong in Ireland. So wrong that we're always divided regarding public figures.
Thirty years ago some intellectuals used to propagate the notion that two sides of the same drumlin were different countries with different cultures and imaginations. You either agreed with partition or you were against it. Either for Dev or Collins. For Haughey or FitzGerald.
Always split down the middle. For Roy Keane or against. For the Rossport Five. Against the fracking. It's all black and white, and nothing stirs the Gaelic juice more than an enemy, a scapegoat, a bad bastard you can get angry with on some live radio talk show.
We're a psychotic nation in the grip of negative rhetoric, suffering from a rage that has never been diagnosed. The Civil War in Ireland didn't create divisions. It was merely another symptom of a very deep malaise.
We relish scapegoats like the English revere the queen or the French enjoy sex. We could have given the Dáil powers to go after the big business crooks in last year's referendum but we preferred to have a toothless parliament and do the gnawing ourselves on the wireless. Maybe we are such a damaged, wounded and colonised little tribe that we don't have the cultural or collective power to ever overcome that negative rage. Perhaps the Republic is just not viable as a spiritual or cultural entity anymore. We may need outside help for more than banking.
Even in culture, there are civil wars. I'm thrilled to be doing a gig in August at Cavan Fleadh with Eleanor Shanley where the great and amazing De Danann are on the bill. I told this to a friend recently and she said "which De Danann?" because apparently there are two De Dananns. The old one and the new one. And two Wolfe Tones. And half a dozen Sinn Féins. And as many republican armies as you're having yourself. We just need to be against someone. So Seán Quinn has stepped into the limelight. He's the bad guy and those who support him are deluded and so enthralled to his feudal lordship that they would kiss the rod that beats them.
I drove through Fermanagh on Wednesday and passed familiar landmarks. The house where an old couple were killed. The school where a teacher was shot. The shop where the dismembered body of a local was found in the fridge. The pub where a boy from Ballyconnell died because he recognised the eyes behind a balaclava. I passed the site of an old garage where an IRA leader was taken out by the SAS. But I saw all those blood-soaked fields now transformed because people voted for change, and played democracy intelligently. And all the while they worked for Seán Quinn.
I saw houses where people grew up poor, and vulnerable to a life of enslavement by the IRA or UVF but found they could earn a living and have a social life and fall in love and get married and have children and rear them in houses with two toilets and still have money to educate their own children. Liberation doesn't come any crisper than that. And Seán Quinn put every sinew of his energy over 40 years into that process of development.
He is an ordinary man who showed leadership in his community. And to call him an oppressor or suggest those who admire him are kissing the rod that beats them is as jaundiced as an artist who once sneered at me and said, "Isn't the Slieve Russell a pretentious name for a hotel in west Cavan?" I replied, "Russell is the name of the feckin' mountain."
To suggest that the support of Brian D'Arcy, a professional journalist with the BBC, a man hounded and victimised by the church, implies that the church supports Seán Quinn is a coat-trailing equation that old-time preachers in galvanised churches one hundred years ago would have been proud of.
Seán Quinn was reared on bread and jam, with the very poorest of creatures and he often wept at their graves on the slopes of Slieve Russell and the shores of Lough Erne. His mother was cross but clever and his siblings went to college but he just got the mountains and the meadows, all 25 acres, and no schooling after primary school. He passed his childhood playing football and driving tractors and his first teacher, Elizabeth Dunne, said before she died that he was the most popular cub ever darkened the school door.
One day his father darkened the door looking for Seán because the weather was good for hay. Ms Dunne said, "You can surely have him 'cos he'll not do anything for me." They had been painting workers in the hayfields and Seán had his arms folded and half the page was green and the other half blue. And the teacher asked, "Where are the men making hay?" and Seán said, "Please Miss, it wasn't ripe so they went home." Whenever a baby died in his own extended family, it was Seán who brought home the little white coffin from Enniskillen or Belfast.
His father sold a bit of land to a gravel man one time and, after he died, Seán said, "I'm going to keep that land and sell the gravel", and so he bought a lorry and his mother signed over the land and she did the phones for him as he began the business.
Elsewhere people were lying in ditches waiting to blow someone's brains out, but from the start Seán Quinn would have no truck with them, and those who know the hidden history of the Troubles will agree that he never paid a penny of protection money though they sometimes burned his machinery. Which is ironic because there are those who will also say certain Irish banks along the Border in fear of being burned out were able to structure their equations smooth enough for money to slide into dubious causes, and grease palms that held Kalashnikovs.
Maybe he was never as clever as the bankers, though tragically he had a huge respect for Anglo-Irish. That's the real story. D'Arcy nailed it in a question last weekend: "Were the accounts that Anglo-Irish presented to Seán Quinn authentic, audited, correct and honest?"
And suppose it was ever proven that Anglo-Irish offered Quinn false documents in its dealings with him. Suppose the accounts were all sly equations that hid the real situation in that bank. Would he be culpable then? If he believed them and they swindled him? Because even a dimwit peasant in trepidation of the master's rod can see that Quinn didn't destroy Anglo-Irish. Anglo-Irish destroyed Quinn, and the country. And for Quinn to be the target of the nation's vitriol and venom says more about the nation's disease than it does about Seán Quinn.

[LeoMc]

SQ gambled the Quinn group and lost it, he has accepted that.
He has also accepted that it was the right decision by the regulators to take over Quinn Insurance.

There seems to be a few boys on here who haven't got their heads round this yet.

His being pilloried in the media is down to his contempt of court which he has also admitted to.

[armaghniac]

Michael Harding's article above is off the point. Of course Quinn did not good work and deserves people's gratitude for that. No doubt he had a false impression of the value of Anglo Irish bank, although he didn't make much of an effort to investigate. But he borrowed the money and he has to pay it back and not hide assets that can be used to pay it back. The country is in a mess and people, especially biollionaires, cannot be excused paying back things (if they have the assets) because they now think the loan was a bad idea. Quinn is the biggest and so has more effort put into sorting him than others.

[haranguerer]

SQ gambled the Quinn group and lost it, he has accepted that.
He has also accepted that it was the right decision by the regulators to take over Quinn Insurance.

There seems to be a few boys on here who haven't got their heads round this yet.

His being pilloried in the media is down to his contempt of court which he has also admitted to.

Sure it is. I believe his contempt is a recent development, the vilification is not.

Anyway, if he has accepted all this, then what has he not accepted? Why is he in contempt?

[armaghniac]

Sure it is. I believe his contempt is a recent development, the vilification is not.

People had a lot of sympathy of Quinn losing his business and so on. They initially would have understanding for Quinn being slow to give the ball back, but as it has become apparent that he has kicked it away then the sympathy has turned to criticism.

[haranguerer]

Sure it is. I believe his contempt is a recent development, the vilification is not.

People had a lot of sympathy of Quinn losing his business and so on. They initially would have understanding for Quinn being slow to give the ball back, but as it has become apparent that he has kicked it away then the sympathy has turned to criticism.

Absolute bollocks, a revision of history. Right from the start he has been made an example of and vilified, not just in the last two months. Just look back through this thread.

[LeoMc]

SQ gambled the Quinn group and lost it, he has accepted that.
He has also accepted that it was the right decision by the regulators to take over Quinn Insurance.

There seems to be a few boys on here who haven't got their heads round this yet.

His being pilloried in the media is down to his contempt of court which he has also admitted to.

Sure it is. I believe his contempt is a recent development, the vilification is not.

Anyway, if he has accepted all this, then what has he not accepted? Why is he in contempt?

Are you genuinely asking these questions?
He has not acepted that the loans were against Quinn finance / personal gaurantees. I remain neutral on this until the cases are heard.
He is in contempt because he moved assets against the the wishes of the courts. These should have remained frozen until the above question was answered.
If the loans were not personally guaranteed the Quinns hold onto them. If they had gauranteed the loans then they owe the bank. By moving the properties Quinns were saying that no matter what the court decided regarding the legality or otherwise of the loans they were holding onto the properties.

[haranguerer]

Well there you go. He believes there is no personal gaurantee, the contempt charge stems from this.

So your post earlier was missing a vital piece of information - you attempted to portray the whole affair as though Quinn agreed with everything that had happened to him, and accepted it, including the contempt, and that 'some lads' were pretty stupid not to have realised this.

But as you've kindly pointed out, he actually didnt really agree with everything, did he?

[LeoMc]

Well there you go. He believes there is no personal gaurantee, the contempt charge stems from this.

So your post earlier was missing a vital piece of information - you attempted to portray the whole affair as though Quinn agreed with everything that had happened to him, and accepted it, including the contempt, and that 'some lads' were pretty stupid not to have realised this.

But as you've kindly pointed out, he actually didnt really agree with everything, did he?

Perhaps if you read what I said.  I said he accepted that he gambled and lost the Quinn group and that he accepted the Regulators were correct in their taking over Quinn Insurance.

I said he admitted the contempt. I did not say he accepted it, the upcoming court case comes from his not accepting that the loans were personal and as you note I have already stated this so I am not sure what vital piece of information I was missing.

The contempt comes from his acting in defiance of a ruling by the courts.

Could you also point out where I said some lads were pretty stupid?

[T Fearon]

Headline news on RTE tonight.He now confusingly says that he's neither a politician nor does he understand the ins and outs of the case,but merely went to Ballyconnell because he was asked and he's a neighbour of the Quinns.Despite this shallow argument displaying an intellect below that of Father Dougal Maguire,is this an attempt to distance himself or has he got a belt from the crozier?

[Eamonnca1]

What odds what he thinks?

[Ulick]

He's a long time media whore who's just realised the Quinn thing maybe isn't the populist joyride he thought it was going to be.

[LeoMc]

Today FM had Sean Kelly saying he wasn't there. Didnt realise anyone claimed he was.

[armaghniac]

You are half a day late, D'Arcy was interviewed this morning on radio. Theo Dorgan was on afterwards and described him as running with the hare and hunting with the hounds.