Who wins from BoI merger?
Bank of Ireland, the second largest Irish retail bank, is set to take over
the British Alliance and Leicester mortgage company. The merger was
welcomed by Employment and Enterprise minister Mary Harney and Fine Gael
finance spokesperson Michael Noonan.
But who will benefit from the BoI merger? We are barely through the first
six months of 1999 and Irish banks have already declared nearly £2 billion
in profits for the year 1998.
Bank after bank has announced record profits for 1998. Ulster Bank profits
rose by 20%. ICC Bank rose 31%. TSB rose 30.7%. First Active rose 15.6%.
EBS rose 29%. AIB was up 39% and was the first Irish company to produce
profits of over 1 billion euros. Two weeks ago BoI announced record profits
of £831 million, also over the 1 billion euro mark. Profits had increased
for BoI by 24%.
These same banks are the ones which, with the introduction of the euro,
increased their foreign exchange prices by between 300 and 600 percent.
These are the same banks that year after year have been reaping substantial
profits from the Irish economy. These profits in the case of AIB and BoI
have been invested not in the Irish economy but in the purchase of banks in
the USA, Britain and Easter Europe.
Already the third and fourth largest banks in Ireland, Ulster Bank and
National Irish, are foreign owned. Now BoI is set to become another
financial institution whose core interests lie outside the Irish economy.
There must be recognition that the banking sector is a vital part of the
Irish economy. Banks exist because of their customers. It is the Irish
people in their everyday work, in their local economies that have made the
profits for Irish banks. The Irish economy has produced the most profitable
financial sector in Europe.
Successive Dublin governments have reneged on their commitments to create a
vibrant third force state-owned bank. Now the control of this vital state
resource is drifting out of the Irish economy. The Dublin government must
act to either fulfill its commitments to create a state-owned bank or at
the very least keep the ownership of the Irish banking system in Irish
hands. Anything less is a sellout of Irish interests.
![[An Phoblacht]](http://republican-news.org/graphics/title_gifs/harp.gif)