Who thinks Sean Quinn is a great businessman now?

Just watching it now. It's very pro Quinn and his rise from rags to riches. Amazing the fawning from some journalists over him. Hopefully the next two parts are a bit more balanced.

Just crazy that he made such bad decisions and questionable legal actions which led to him in front of the courts and he still feels that "they" have taken my business from me. Everyone else fault.

That is like saying that because there wasn't a garda car with a speed camera near an accident, they have some responsibility for enabling speeding that caused an accident.

It absolves personal responsibility for law-breaking to imply that the regulators should have been there at every turn. About 4 million other people in this country didn't need the regulator to tell them not to engage in what Quinn did.

"Lucky" With planning permissions.

Wouldn't we all like to see what connections and relationship he and the family had with certain county councils at the time.

and the Google StreetView is only 2009.

I am sure he completed all the Environmental Impact Statements needed.

When you think that the Galway bypass can be stopped on relatively minor grounds, and something like this just gets driven through the countryside you realise the way he got away with it.

Yeh 100 percent amazing that he thought he was sheltered from all of the global turmoil. The two Anglo biyos fairly out foxed him there !!

The regulator isn't in the banks every day looking at the transactions. The audits should have picked up the problem so there is some blame on the big accountancy firms. The first problem was the day-to-day governance of the banks. The second problem was David McWilliams' pitch to Brian Lenihan to guarantee the banks. All the officials opposed that because they had some sense that something was wrong, but Lenihan and Cowen overruled them. Without that guarantee, Anglo would have collapsed, we would still have had to prop up the other banks, but the damage to the economy would be far less.

It all came down to a few men, Quinn, Fitzpatrick, Dunne, McWilliams, Lenihan and Cowen, the common characteristic being that they were all too stupid to realise how stupid the rest of them were.

I would have no faith in the planners in Cavan County Council anyone. One of them played a big part in refusing a developer planning for a big housing development on the outskirts of the town and a year later bought the land himself and got planning no bother and then build 100+ houses on it. As for the engineers getting stone and concrete for "jobs" and then diverting them to their own private houses which they were building. Corruption was widespread back then.

Sorry for going off topic just wanted to let ye know the type of individuals in the council he would have been dealing with.

I see someone mentioned the planning applications, plenty of talk locally that a lot of those buildings did not have planning permission, once built any objections from the council would then be shouted down as an attack on jobs etc. He tried this in the UK also, but the local councils over there were not as much of a pushover like our lot.

That is pretty mad, I hadn't heard of that before. It is in the Republic, but you can see the UK road signs on Google Street View. And it has a speed limit of 65km/h, which isn't a standard here. There's barriers the length of it that can be closed, and there's signs at some points saying the road closes at 5.30 PM. But the Google Street View car obviously drove it, so there must be public access. The Anglo Celt claims it did get permission in 2003, but you'd have to wonder about how robust that process was to allow a 10km private road across a mountain. (https://www.anglocelt.ie/2021/09/23/mannok-hopes-to-continue-quarrying-for-20-years/)

And I'd nearly wager a bet they are all good Fianna Fail men.

Could be true then, I think it was 10 years ago I stumbled on it. Entirely unexpected at the time.

Quite probably. While Martin is doing a relatively good job, I can never vote for FF until the generation that oversaw the 2000-2008 period are gone.

Ignorance, Arrogance and Ego.

And he had no real knowledge of the banking sector. He had no idea about exposure. He was ready for the complexities of banking and I'd imagine he though the government would save him too.

He really should gone all in on property and he'd have been fine.