The Eighty-Five Billion Euro Man

by Donal Conaty

  I had phoned Dermot that morning and persuaded him to come into the office. He reluctantly agreed because he was meeting people in a pub called Doheny and Nesbitt's. It seemed a bit early for that. Dermot had been in the meeting for just a few minutes when he became agitated and started looking out the window.

  ‘There's no chance this is going to interfere with the rugby is there?’ he asked.

  Ajai looked at him over his glasses.

  ‘We have been here all night,’ he said. ‘We will be here all night tonight too. And we need you here,’ he said sternly.

  ‘Well, I'm afraid that's not possible,’ Dermot said flatly. ‘I've already issued a press release cancelling the bailout talks because of the snow.’

  Ajai spat coffee across the room.

  ‘What snow?’ he spluttered. ‘That scattering? Be serious, Mulhearn! You are in bailout talks with the IMF.’

  Dermot looked at Ajai with utter disdain.

  ‘Gah,’ he said. ‘Don't be such a spoilsport. You sound just like Michael Noonan. Were you ever a teacher? You do what you like, Ajai. We're going to make a snowman.’

  ‘When I listen to you, Mr Mulhearn,’ Ajai said. ‘I find it very hard to believe that Ireland ever had a booming economy. Your country is facing ruin. Do you understand that?’

  ‘Well, I'll have you know that we had a very booming economy,’ Dermot replied sniffily. ‘We've faced disaster before, you know. When necessary, heroes have died for Ireland. Granted those were different times and those people had very little else to be doing with their time. Still, we are well capable of struggling through. More importantly, Ajai, do you not realise that this is a Sunday? Who ever heard of a public servant working on a Sunday? And it's snowing. We always take time off when it snows; it's a public service tradition.’ He got up to leave. ‘Good day, gentlemen,’ he said as he slammed the door behind him.

  Ajai sank into his chair. He took off his glasses and rubbed his temples. He looked at me and through me at the same time. ‘Go and keep an eye on that idiot,’ he said coldly. ‘Go to the rugby with him. Go wherever he goes. Don't let him out of your sight and don't let him waste any more money.’

  I went, but I worried. I couldn't get into the spirit of things at the rugby. It's not really a game I understand. The newly built Aviva stadium was impressive though. It looked as if all the building in Ireland had been an exercise in showing off. I left Dermot in a pub near the stadium and returned to the office to see where things stood. Ajai was gone but he had left a note on my desk.

  ‘Give this document to Mr Mulhearn for his Taoiseach to announce,’ the note read. ‘It is clear to me now that the main condition of any Irish bailout should not be the repayment terms but the degree of oversight we have on Irish budgetary affairs. That is where you come in.

  ‘I am appointing you Dublin Bureau Chief for the IMF. Congratulations, if they are appropriate. I will review your position in twelve months.

  ‘By the way,’ the note concluded, ‘we decided on a combined interest rate of 5.8 per cent. See that they make the payments.’

  I was still staring dumbly at the note when Dermot came into the office two hours later. He was with some Argentine rugby supporters who he was showing around Dublin. ‘We're going to Shanahan's,’ he said. ‘Will you come and join us? I want to show these feckers that our beef is better than theirs.’

  ‘No, thank you,’ I muttered weakly.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ he said. Then he noticed the piece of paper in my hand. ‘What's that? Is that the bailout document? Have you something for the Taoiseach to announce? I'll be seeing him later. We always have a trad session on a Sunday night.’

  I gave him the document from Ajai. Dermot folded it in half and put it in his pocket.

  ‘Do you not want to know what's in it?’ I asked.

  ‘Whatever for? It won't make a blind bit of difference to me. In any event it will be better coming from the Taoiseach,’ he said with a wink. ‘The Irish people fought long and hard for the right to be shafted by their own kind.’

  ‘Is that what they fought for?’ I asked him. ‘I thought I read something about fighting for freedom?’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Dermot.

  TWO

  WE OPERATE IN

  THE GREY AREA

  The next day I was sitting at my new desk in the Department of Finance at seven o'clock in the morning. Whenever I start a new assignment I like to get my feet under the desk early. It creates a good impression and lets everyone know that the IMF is in town and we mean business. I generally find that the people I work with soon follow my lead and start coming into work early too. However, on this occasion I was still alone in the office at 10.30 a.m. There was no sign of anybody from the Department. As I crossed the road to the office, I had seen other people making their way to work, so I knew it wasn't a public holiday.

  At least I no longer have to bribe the security guard with €20 every time I want to get into the office. I negotiated with him and we eventually reached agreement. He was a tricky customer but at least he turned up to work. At first I insisted that no one should have to pay to get into their office but he was utterly unimpressed with this argument and he pointed out that jobs in this country were increasingly hard to come by. ‘There's plenty of people who would pay for the chance to work,’ he said with exasperating logic. So we came to an arrangement whereby I would pay him €20 per week for constant ongoing access to the office. I must admit I was quite pleased with myself, having bargained him down from his initial demand for €50. He refused point blank to issue me with a receipt however. There seems to be a deep-seated mistrust of receipts here.

  When I finally got into the office, I was surprised to find that the floor was littered with party hats and streamers. Empty champagne bottles lay scattered around, and, unpleasantly, there was a used condom on my desk, which was right in the middle of the room. I lifted it with a pen and put it and the pen in a bin.

  I can only assume that my new colleagues went from celebrating the rugby to celebrating the bailout. They may not know how to negotiate but they certainly know how to enjoy themselves.

  Two cleaners came in at 9.30 a.m. but they didn't clean up.

  ‘Look Rose, cham-pay-en,’ said one, giving the word ‘champagne’ a mysterious extra syllable.

  ‘Deadly, Ruby,’ said the other. ‘I love cham-pay-en.’

  ‘D'ye want some?’ Rose asked me to my surprise.

  ‘It's 9.30 in the morning,’ I replied, perhaps a little sniffily.

  ‘Oooh, suit yourself,’ she said. ‘Come on, Ruby.’

  With that they were gone, taking the last few bottles of champagne with them and leaving me to tidy the mess. I wouldn't be able to work in it – no reasonable person could. Half an hour later the office was beginning to look fit for purpose, although I had not been able to do anything about the stains on the carpet.

  One by one, hungover civil servants started to arrive at around 11 a.m. They huddled in small groups by the photocopier and the watercooler, washing down Nurofen Plus with black coffee. They spoke in muffled tones but stopped talking and looked suspicious whenever I glanced over at them.

  At midday Dermot arrived, fresh as an ocean breeze. Somehow his single-minded pursuit of a good time never seemed to result in a hangover. With the obvious exception of unpredictable flashes of anger whenever reality intruded on his day, I had yet to see anything affect his composure for long.

  ‘You're still here,’ he said, looking around. ‘You have the place looking nice. If I give you some petty cash would you pick up some orchids? They'd set the room off nicely.’

  ‘Ajai seconded me to the Department for twelve months to oversee the adjustments you need to make to ensure that the bailout succeeds,’ I said. ‘He didn't say anything about orchids.’

  ‘Is that right? I'll have to ask the Minister to get the flowers so. Twelve months, you say? You'll be needing an apartment,’ he said. ‘I know just the place for you.’

 
; ‘The hotel will do fine for the moment,’ I said, ‘but I will obviously have to economise. The IMF isn't made of money.’

  Dermot laughed until he realised I wasn't joking.

  ‘Well you're not alone there are you,’ he said, affecting a more serious note. ‘I hear economising is the new going out. I don't think it will catch on. How is Ajai by the way? Did he leave cash or a cheque? I hope he left some of it in cash.’

  I rubbed my temples. ‘He left neither,’ I said. ‘There is a long road to be travelled before we release any funds.’

  ‘Is there indeed?’ said Dermot. He was momentarily vexed, as though he had had immediate plans for the money. ‘Will we be passing Leopardstown on our travels, do you think?’

  I was trying not to lose my temper.

  ‘Did you have a chance to read the terms and conditions in the Memorandum of Understanding on the bailout?’ I asked him.

  ‘The terms and conditions?’ he said. ‘No one reads them. Come on, I'll buy you lunch.’

  Another lunch with Dermot. I could feel the button on my trousers digging into soft flesh. I have always been conscious that a sedentary lifestyle can lead to piling on the pounds. I rarely snack at work and usually have a green salad for lunch. Dermot doesn't believe in green salads. He won't allow anyone eating with him to order anything that might pass as healthy. I couldn't face any more rich food – he already had me so full of foie gras I felt like a fat duck. I told him I was in the middle of slashing his department's spending for the first quarter of 2011 and would have a sandwich at my desk.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ he said.

  Dermot came back from lunch early. I hadn't been around for long but I knew that meant something was wrong, seriously wrong. I was right. He stormed into the office like we didn't own the place.

  ‘What's all this?’ he asked, throwing the morning newspapers on my desk.

  ‘Terms and conditions of the bailout,’ I said. ‘You did realise there would be terms and conditions, didn't you? I asked you this morning if you had read them.’

  ‘Of course I knew there would be terms and conditions,’ he fumed. ‘But there's no grey area. This is utterly transparent. We operate in the grey area – without it we can't function properly – and I can't find it.’

  ‘The IMF is not made up of politicians,’ I told him. ‘We do grey suits, not grey areas. Nor, for that matter, should you.’

  ‘Don't be ridiculous,’ Dermot shot back. ‘If we don't have a grey area, we'll have a black economy. Do the IMF do black economies?’

  I didn't bother to reply as Dermot sank into a chair and opened the Memorandum of Understanding.

  ‘Weekly reports, monthly reports, quarterly reviews,’ he lamented. ‘Balance sheets, adherence to targets. It's like a secret language, complete mumbo jumbo.’

  Suddenly, as is his habit, Dermot brightened. His capacity to change mood is truly extraordinary.

  ‘I get it. This is just for the optics,’ he said, winking at me ‘No one actually reads these reports, do they? I bet you have warehouses full of unread reports back in Washington.’

  ‘Ajai reads them,’ I said. ‘He learns them off by heart. Ajai can recall every minute detail of every report he has ever read. It's very impressive.’

  Dermot looked crushed. He reached into his pocket for some Nurofen Plus and dry swallowed quite a few of them.

  ‘I'm going to talk to the Brians. They won't like this one bit,’ he said, as though it mattered whether the Brians liked it or not. He left abruptly.

  I didn't see Dermot again until I got out of the shower in my hotel bathroom that night and he handed me a towel. I wrapped the towel around my waist.

  ‘I wish you would stop letting yourself into my room,’ I said. ‘I find it very disconcerting. Couldn't you have phoned from reception?’

  ‘I did, but you were in the shower,’ he said with flawless logic.

  ‘What is it you want, Dermot?’

  ‘The Brians aren't happy,’ he said gravely. ‘Not happy at all. Particularly about this business of us paying some of the bailout ourselves. €17 billion? That's a bit rich, isn't it?’

  ‘But you gave them the document to sign,’ I said. ‘Surely they read it? Nothing in it should be a surprise to them.’

  ‘Come off it,’ said Dermot. ‘They were never going to read the damn thing.’

  ‘Well you should have read it then, or at least attended the negotiations,’ I said.

  Dermot sat down at the edge of my bed.

  ‘But I have nothing in common with Ajai,’ he explained. ‘I'm used to negotiating with people I know – people I went to school with or people I play golf with – friends. How on earth am I supposed to negotiate with a perfect stranger? It makes no sense. Our negotiations take place in a framework of social partnership. You get to know each other first. You look after each other. That's how we negotiate round here.’

  ‘How has that worked out for you?’ I asked.

  ‘It was grand until you came along,’ Dermot said bitterly.

  He jumped to his feet then, suddenly smiling broadly.

  ‘Let's forget the bailout. Come on for a drink,’ he said. ‘Tonight is for celebrating.’

  I was beginning to find his sudden shifts of mood dizzying.

  ‘Celebrating?’ I said. ‘Celebrating what?’

  ‘Don't you follow the news at all? It's not every day that England don't get to host the World Cup. Come on, the Taoiseach will be singing. It'll be great craic. It always is.’

  And it was. If the Irish redirected a fraction of the energy that they put into partying towards negotiating, I'm sure they would have got a much better deal from the EU on the bailout. They may even have got to burn the bondholders, which would have been a real excuse for a party.

  We met in a pub called MacIntyre's, just around the corner from my hotel. The Taoiseach was already holding court when we came in and he continued to do so until the early hours of the morning. There was a small group of government ministers and senior civil servants hanging on his every word, but I couldn't help notice that they kept exchanging knowing glances, as though the Taoiseach was the butt of a joke that none of them had bothered to tell him about. He has a great voice for the kind of ballads you would hear in the Irish bars in Jersey, and his voice is strong enough for him to sing unaccompanied. But his real gift is as a mimic. He had spent just a few short minutes in Ajai's company but he had him down. It was impossible not to laugh.

  ‘This is not the first time the IMF has put together a programme in a country that is just about to face an election,’ Mr Cowen said. I was pretty sure he was quoting verbatim from an interview Ajai had given the Financial Times. ‘In fact this happened in Korea in 1997. It happened in Brazil. So we have experience with this. And it's quite striking in such situations that governments are responsible. They do the right thing. They do what needs to be done.’ It could have been Ajai saying those words; the mimicry was perfect. But Mr Cowen had a broad, vulgar smirk on his face as he said the last lines about governments doing the right thing. It was clear that neither he nor his audience believed it for a moment.

  The Taoiseach was actually a very likeable man when I met him in person. ‘A chara Gael,’ he said to me, as he shook my hand warmly before pulling me into an inappropriate bear hug. ‘The IMF will always be welcome here.’

  Just then a wild blonde woman with bright red lips and a slightly deranged grin dragged me away from the bar to a small dancefloor.

  ‘Come on the Eighty-five Billion Euro Man,’ she roared. ‘Show us your fucking moves.’ She held me in a vice-like grip, spinning me round and round and mouthing the most outrageous expletives in my ear.

  ‘I'm not used to dancing,’ I said awkwardly.

  ‘You're right, you're shite,’ she said, smiling in an unhinged way as she threw me onto a chair the Minister for Finance had just vacated and went in search of her next victim.

  ‘Who on earth was that?’ I asked Dermot after I had caught my b
reath.

  ‘Do you like her? That's Sweary Mary,’ he said. ‘She's the government minister in charge of education no less. This is a great little country and no mistake. She's the Tánaiste too, of course.’

  ‘Tánaiste,’ I struggled a bit with the Gaelic word. ‘What is a Tánaiste? Is it a medical condition?’

  ‘Hah,’ said Dermot. ‘It might well be! But no, the Tánaiste is the Taoiseach's deputy. If anything should ever happen to Cowen, Mary will be in charge of Ireland and of all the money you're giving us.’

  ‘Lending you,’ I corrected.

  ‘Whatever,’ said Dermot. I made a mental note to tell Ajai about Sweary Mary. Then I thought better of it and made a mental note not to tell Ajai anything at all about her.

  I went out to get some air and regain my composure and found the Taoiseach sitting on a barrel singing quietly to himself.

  ‘I wish I had someone to love me, I'm weary of being alone,’ he sang.

  ‘Very nice, Taoiseach,’ I said as he finished the song and lit a cigarette.

  ‘Ah, my American friend,’ he said, and then he muttered something. I didn't quite catch it but it sounded like he said ‘my only friend'. Anyway, I thought it best to pretend I hadn't heard it.

  ‘That was a lovely song, Taoiseach,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘A lovely song, a lovely song.’ Suddenly he became slightly belligerent. ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘that for better or worse I am the captain of this sinking ship, but I have to come out here in the freezing cold to have a smoke because of Micheál bloody Martin and his stupid fucking smoking ban. What do you think of that? Do you think that's right or fair or proper?’

  I looked at him and around me. There was no one there to help with what was turning into an awkward situation. ‘Micheál bloody Martin?’ I asked nervously.

  ‘Yes. Bloody Micheál bloody Martin. Bloody smarmy eejit. Bloody do-gooder. Bloody Minister for Foreign Affairs Martin,’ Mr Cowen almost shouted while waving his hands in the air.