Ireland was attracting the admiration of the financial world in the early years of the new millennium. During the period of growth known as the Celtic Tiger, the economy was booming. Property was being built and sold in order to meet the seemingly insatiable demand of the public. Government coffers were being filled by the taxes on property transactions and property prices were rising at an unprecedented rate. Concerns were occasionally voiced that a catastrophic collapse would follow because the boom was being financed by poorly regulated and indisciplined lending institutions which were borrowing heavily in the interbank markets. But such dissenting voices were ignored by most commentators who acknowledged that the boom could not continue but predicted a “soft landing” rather than a crash.
I wanted to write about and examine the activities and motivation of ordinary people who were caught up in this whirlpool of optimism which was eventually to have such disastrous consequences.
Hold To Account, my first novel, is set in a large town in the north east of Ireland during this period. Peter Howard, a soon-to-retire bank manager, is asked to temporarily take over the job of Joan Archer, a colleague who has been suspended from duty without explanation. Was she merely being overzealous in growing and expanding the bank’s business? Has she committed some crime or, as she contends, was there a conspiracy against her? Was she being scapegoated for failing to follow minor and often contradictory guidelines while her superiors at senior management level were acting in a manner which had to potential to undermine the country’s economy and financial independence?
Peter Howard deals with the impact of the investigation on the staff, the self-serving attitude of some of Joan’s customers and the trauma caused to her family. As a web of tax evasion, money laundering and property speculation is revealed, Peter unwittingly becomes enmeshed in a situation which endangers his own job and reputation while we encounter a banking system which contains the seeds of its own inevitable collapse.
The novel provides a uniquely intimate account of the workings of a bank branch, the shortcomings of the bank’s management structure and its flawed and often incompatible practices and regulations. Against a background of the threat posed by an over-inflated Irish property market, the reader encounters the malpractice of mortgage providers, the abdication of responsibility by politicians and media, the lure of the “property ladder” and the inefficiency of self-regulation.
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