VETERANS recognised many familiar faces among the shareholders at the Allied Irish Banks shareholder meeting in the bank’s headquarters yesterday.

They had travelled across the treacherous and icy roads from Kerry and Mayo to be in Ballsbridge for the 11am start of the bank’s special shareholder meeting called to approve the transfer of loans to the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA).

The etiquette of such meetings demands nobody mentions the fact that the bank’s major shareholders had long since voted and the decision was a foregone conclusion.

Half-filled hall

Everybody in the large, half-filled hall knew they had turned up as part of a ritual and that their oratory could do little more than discomfort the exquisitely polite executive chairman, Dan O’Connor, and the stony-faced, and largely silent, managing director Colm Doherty.

As a piece of performance art, yesterday’s offering failed to delight. It lacked the drama of May’s annual general meeting which had seen former chairman Dermot Gleeson clash repeatedly with shareholders and one shareholder pelt the stage with eggs, an act that definitely veered from the accepted script.

Back in May, the same room had been packed with furious and raw shareholders baying for blood while the two men who held the bank’s top jobs, and had overseen the bank’s reckless lending, sat on the podium, their mere presence goading their opponents to tell sometimes heart-breaking tales of financial losses, or experiment with new and ever more imaginative forms of invective.

Yesterday, many of the same actors went through their lines but without their usual conviction. Mr Niall Murphy, a former AIB employee and now a regular thorn in the side of his former employer, was as colourful as ever when he told “Dan, Dan the Audit Man” O’Connor that he had more “confidence of the Blessed Virgin Mary appearing outside the Bank Centre” than that NAMA would “save us from the cess pool of ruin”. But somehow he failed to land any punches on the senior managers who sat on the dais just yards away.

Another veteran shareholder to speak was Dermot O’Carroll who challenged Mr O’Connor to welcome Central Bank governor Patrick Honohan’s call for some sort of US-style inquiry into the meltdown of the banking sector and to promise to co-operate with such an inquiry “without any mental reservations.” It was an invitation Mr O’Connor politely declined, saying such an inquiry was a matter for Government.

Perhaps the best line, one that sounded as if it came from some minor Elizabethan drama, came from a shareholder who asked: “What do you know about being sorry? If you were sorry you wouldn’t be here” and ended with an old-fashioned flourish by declaring: “Sirs, you have no shame.” It was a good line, and well delivered, but we all knew it would have about as much effect as similar rhetorical flourishes in the Dail.

After three hours, Mr O’Connor wound up the meeting to what one sensed was the secret relief of those with long journeys ahead of them and to those who simply wanted to get some Christmas shopping done on the day before Christmas Eve. While the majority of the bank’s directors, who tend to sit in the first row with their backs to shareholders, got up and shook their legs and chatted with shareholders, Mr O’Connor disappeared in a flash, missing the indifferent coffee but excellent mince pies handed out to shareholders as they headed for home.

- Thomas Molloy

Irish Independent

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