It continues to beggar belief. These are the lives of ordinary people that those would see themselves as all-powerful have proceeded to destroy without compunction.
Robert Maxwell is supposed to have said there were two kinds of wealth: that which you possessed and that which you had access to. In his world, in the world of so many modern money men and women, the truly fun stuff is the latter. That's the stuff that really energises and excites them.
That was the stuff which, last year, brought us to our economic knees.
Our downfall has come about because those that possessed some wealth wished to use it to lever access to the vastly greater sum - a sum they clearly coveted - of what was essentially other people's wealth; ordinary people's wealth, the little men and women, the grafters in society - a wealth held, in fact, by the institutions the rest of us thought could be trusted to take care of their charges.
The desire to make money out of simple access rather than only ever act prudently on possession is the key to everything that has happened over the past year.
And now it looks as if Ireland is going to have to pay a terrible price for that economic incontinence.
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