The Bank Blog - Intimate Relations

Not long ago it was only tech giants like Dell pulling out of Ireland because of the high wage cost, but now the banks, those cushy numbers with money to burn, so to speak. Or is that bondholders not to burn?

Never mind, the fact that two banks with which I had intimate relations are leaving my life says it all, the bigger my intimate relations the greater the betrayal. Note to self: get things in perspective.

Zebra print jeans from 'No Romance', pity about the pint

I had a summer job in ACC in my teens. It is my only claim to working in a bank and a pin on a circuit board could do my job a million times faster now. I was one of about ten in the filing department. All we did was roam up and down the aisles of files whispering, gossiping and misfiling. It was my first introduction to life outside the convent; the filing department was a place for people with no training in anything other than the alphabet. I met my first gay man, there was an art student who talked about nude modelling and sex, there was a Northern Ireland militant woman, probably lesbian, but there were only rumours that they really existed then, it was gloriously colourful. That was the year of Michael Jackson's ‘Rock with You’, Queen's ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ and the one and only truly fabulous Blondie ‘Call me’, and she's still performing, Blonde Power.

That filing department was where many bank managers began, no doubt there were similar cases in other banks, and when they all grew up they lent lots and lots of money, like billions that they didn’t have, because they weren’t exactly trained in finance or economics (this is just a theory, but a good one). So that is why when the young people in the filing department and the untrained governance people in politics all grew up, we had a catastrophic meltdown that hurt all the other people in the country that weren’t property developers. Which all comes back to me writing a landlady blog and having two strange men roam about my house, along with two very familiar sons, who for the rest of their lives I’m likely to see little of, as they emigrate along with all their highly educated peers. Leaving us with the filing department to run the country again.

My intimate relationship with Danske Bank is slightly more grown up but we’ve grown apart slowly as the account dried up, the distance makes the break a little easier. In the nineties, when I’d had enough of being an employee, having to ask my boss for a couple of hours off to get home to a sick baby and him asking me what the au pair was for, I decided the only way forward was to work for myself, then I could be a stickler for time and never give myself holidays. I opened an account in what was then National Irish and was looked after by Christine, the most personable female manager of any institution I’ve encountered. She was interested in my work (I was an interior designer when there were only ten in the Golden Pages), smoothed out problems and made things happen, she was a real voice; as alien a thing in today’s telephone button banking, as my time in filing.

Now I’m a student again, bringing sandwiches into college, I’ve got to find fees for the next three years and that’s how the Credit Union came into my life, I’m just one step away from buying savings stamps in the post office. Oh No. I feel like I’m in the eighties again, without the figure. Time to dust off my jumpsuit and grab my headband, ‘don’t leave me haaaanging on the telephoooonnnne’