Most employees at the big Irish banks have survived the crisis

It’s easy to paint the scandalous Anglo Irish Bank tapes, where executives talk about duping the government into injecting funds into the bank and chant xenophobic anti-German songs, as an indication of a bygone era of excess, where the ‘golden circle’ of directors led Irish institutions into ruin.

However, while the villains of the piece at the top of Anglo's tree – David Drumm, Anglo’s former chief executive, Sean Fitzpatrick, its former chief executive and chairman, Willie McAteer, finance director and chief risk officer, Pat Whealer, managing director of the bank’s lending business, and John Bowe, head of capital markets – have long since moved on, the large Irish banks still have a large contingent of people working for them who have survived the crisis.

While headcount at Anglo Irish Bank, now known as the Irish Bank Resolution Corporation, has been decimated since 2008, with 73% (or 1,528) of its employees leaving the firm, those that remain are predominantly long-serving staff. In fact, 48% of staff at IBRC have been employed for 5-15 years, according to a report into Ireland’s covered institutions produced by Mercer earlier this year.

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The Anglo tapes revealed in the Irish Independent this week expose conversations between prominent executives during which Bowe said the €7bn bailout figure requested from the central bank was something he has picked “out of my arse” in order to encourage the government to put some skin in the game. The bank later collapsed and this was one of the key reasons why the Ireland had to accept a €67.5bn bailout from the EU and International Monetary Fund.

Ireland’s big domestic banks would have you believe that they’ve changed, with the era of irresponsible lending fuelled by an old boys’ network of executives consigned to history. However, the bulk of staff at the banks have been present throughout.

Despite ongoing job cuts, however, the table below from Mercer shows that tenure at the Irish banks is decidedly high – the average Bank of Ireland employee has been employed for over 14 years, for example.

One financial services headhunter in Dublin tells us that the majority of his work in recent years has been shipping bankers between the main Irish banks. “Most jobs are related to the working out of bad property loans, and the bulk of experience in this area lies with those who have been employed throughout the crisis,” he said. “Combined with that you also have a lot of long-serving staff that would be expensive to make redundant and who are hanging on until retirement.”

Many would argue that you can’t blame rank-and-file staff for the crimes of those leading the organisations. However, an investigation into the Irish banking crisis by Finnish financier Peter Nyberg in 2011 pointed to “widespread herding” and “disaster myopia” within most bank staff at the height of the crisis, suggesting that most employees were culpable.

"It was claimed by a number of bankers that management and staff were not motivated by compensation alone. Most would compete, it was claimed, as they had during the previous period of lower compensation, on the basis of natural competitiveness and professional pride,” he wrote.