Thurles Information

I confess I have very little understanding of the workings of our legal system. However a basic understanding of right and wrong was instilled in me from an early age; the substance of which I committed to memory. I refer of course to the learning of the Ten Commandments, as recorded in the Old Testament Bible books of Exodus (Israelites coming out of slavery) and Deuteronomy (The second statement of Law).

No longer imparted to students in our today’s educational institutions with the same conviction; these same Ten Commandments included one particular strong directive; Commandment No. 8, if my memory serves me correctly, containing just four words “Thou shalt not steal”.

Today a former Bank of Ireland employee has been jailed for one year (12 Months) for stealing €144,000 from her place of employment between the years 2004 and 2012, (which surely says something about banking checks and balances). Note the total amount stolen was just over €144,000. We are informed that the female employee in question paid back everything she stole, however she has lost her job and has been forced to sell her house.

Passing judgement on the case, Judge M/s Melanie Greally correctly stated that activity of this kind, committed by persons in her position, should be marked by an appropriate jail sentence, which she felt was 12 months in prison.

Compare this case to the “Green Jersey” Agenda Court Case.

Now let us look at the comparisons. Three senior Irish bankers, one of whom was from Co. Tipperary, were jailed in 2016 for their role in the collapse of a bank. Their jail sentence was for up to three and a half years for conspiring to defraud investors arising from the 2008 banking crisis.  They were the first senior bankers in Ireland to be jailed, following a 74 day criminal trial (Ireland’s longest ever at the tax payers expense).  Actual crime committed; conspiring together and with others to mislead investors, depositors and lenders, by setting up a 7.2 billion Euro circular transaction scheme between March and September of 2008, to bolster Anglo Irish Bank’s balance sheet.  Judge Mr Martin Nolan, passing judgement, described this conspiracy as a “very serious crime”.

Did our three senior Irish bankers sell their homes or make any restitution, to the same degree, as did our Bank of Ireland employee?

The ‘Banking Crash’ pushed Ireland into three years of a sovereign bailout in 2010 and during our sojourn on this earth it will still take at least another 10 years for us, as a nation, to recover all funding pumped into presently operating banks.

Remember we had to stump up some 64 billion Euro; that is almost 40% of our annual economic output, after our property collapse forced the biggest state bank rescue in the Euro zone.

We are led to believe that, “Justice is blind”. This expression literally means that justice is both impartial and objective. Lady justice, also known as Iustitia, the statue that appears on the exterior of certain ‘Halls of Justice’; she who wears the blindfold (representing impartiality), holds a scales or balance (representing the measuring of the strengths of both sides of any case), and a sword (representing authority), all lead us to believe that justice must not treat close acquaintances differently to total strangers, or indeed rich people better than those penniless.

So, my question, taking into account my failure to fully understand the current principals of the Irish Justice system and the forgetfulness of bankers to remember the ‘Eighth Commandment’, is; “Is the justice metered out here, in both these court cases, fully proportional and equally balanced?”