Has any politician criticised the people who stole money from Bank of Ireland?

Bronte said:
I'd have thought withdrawing money from an ATM on a credit card is borrowing money.
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A credit card account may well facilitate ATM cash withdrawals but it's quite a stretch to claim that it's remotely suitable for that purpose.
 
Bronte said:
I'd have thought withdrawing money from an ATM on a credit card is borrowing money.
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I can even withdraw cash from an ATM (anywhere in the world) using my normal debit card with no funds and my current account will just go deeper into authorised overdraft as I do it, up to a limit of 10k.
 
Brendan Burgess said:
@ S class

Do you believe that people who knew they had no money in their account who withdrew €500 with a view to then abandoning their account knowing that it would be impractical for Bank of Ireland to pursue them did anything wrong?

Brendan
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I wouldn't pass judgement on them. If the bank cannot be bothered to persue them that's another sign of a badly run bank.

You do not have the support of anybody in authority agreeing with your opinion that the people who made withdrawals are thieves.
 
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Even worse than not criticising are politicians seemingly justifying it by wringing their hands and defending their action on the basis that return to school costs were so high.
Not sure how this can be seen as anything other than as described in todays IT article
 
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It's interesting that about 95% of Brendan's piece required pointing out the failures of the state and banks and politicians for context. Very little about those who took advantage of bank failure.

Politicians have created a welfare state with increasing issues of crime and low enforcement. Ireland is infamous for our banking issues and wild west finances.

Complaining about people running to the ATMs feels a bit like complaining about 3rd class passengers stealing spoons on the Titanic. Or foxes stealing chickens that have been left unprotected.
 
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Politicians being politicians.
Free over drafts at ATMs.

I'm not sure why the laser focus on the lesser most obvious part of this fiasco.
 

I've always regarded selective morality as a bit wishy washy. Something is either right or wrong. End of.

The fact that our invertebrate, populist politicians are consistently unable to call a spade a spade - amusingly in this case even the virtuous Social Democrats weren't willing to call it out - merely highlights why they are poor role models for anyone with a shred of morality.
 
AlbacoreA said:
Scorpion and the Frog.

I'm not entirely why people are surprised at Politicians playing at Politics. They know their audience.
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I suspect, to get back to the actual title of this thread, that any respectable politician who dared suggest that this was theft or looting, would be quickly metaphorically torn to shreds publicly by populists - the fact that a council candidate for a very populist party was content to suggest they were just ya know, trying to help their children out of poverty, would indicate to you that no "respectable" mainstream politician can even dare call a spade a spade in this scenario.

The fact that Brendan's persistence in describing those who took 1k out of an account they knew didn't contain that as thieves is being challenged on this thread surely tells you such politicians might struggle to get heard, to put it mildly, in a cacophony of very loud voices more than ready to pounce on the metaphorical hare.
We have a real problem with moral hazard in our society, not helped in part by an unwillingness to address intent and personal responsibility. It has fed into our politics through phrases like "the most vulnerable" and undoes real questions about how best to help those less well off in our society.
 
At first I was quite shocked by Brendan so directly referring to it as stealing, but after thinking about it some more I have come to agree that it is a fair characterisation of what some of those involved were doing. There were those who knew that they would have to pay it back and so they were just using the mistake to knowingly take out more than they were supposed to, which is wrong, but a relatively minor offence and probably not meriting the label of stealing. It sadly seems, however, that quite a few took money without intending to pay it back. They were knowingly exploiting a mistake for their own benefit and they knew that it was wrong. That, to me, is clearly stealing (at least in spirit) and I don't see how anyone could consider it to not be. It is no different to taking someone's wallet when they aren't looking.

I find it quite depressing that there are people who think that the wrongness of the action is mitigated (or even excused) by the banks being profitable, or that politicians, or anyone else, are somehow to blame for people doing something that they knew was wrong.
 

In my post that mentioned that banks . It clearly leads with that the customers were wrong under the law and posted a previous example of a similar issue before this incident. So in no way did that excuse or mitigate that.

It's more like saying to a room of people there's my wallet borrow what you want, knowing it a certainty people in the room will not pay back anything they borrow. Then when they do exactly what you allowed...you call them thief. Or in this case you want the politicians to call them thieves and seem indignant when they don't. At this point I'm not sure if these thread about politicians or just the people who withdrew money.

The banks profitably was mentioned because it highly likely cost cutting, staff churn, outsourcing, if not directly, indirectly exacerbated the problem. Its going to argued thats a different topic.
 

The law is clear. But I think they will have issues pursuing it as simplistic theft.
 
AlbacoreA said:
The law is clear. But I think they will have issues pursuing it as simplistic theft.
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Far too many references to "simplistic" concepts in this thread for my liking.

Taking something of value from someone else without permission is stealing and that's all that needs to be said.

(Sometimes I secretly wish that sophisticated semanticists would fall head first into their own verbiage and drown from an overdose of prolixity!)
 
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AlbacoreA said:
It's more like saying to a room of people there's my wallet borrow what you want, knowing it a certainty people in the room will not pay back anything they borrow.
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I suggest that a closer analogy is finding a wallet that someone lost, and taking the money in it for yourself. It is low-trust-society dishonesty that, to return to Brendan's original question, I think politicians should try to steer the population away from, if they wish to be leaders of society.

I would like to live in a high-trust society, where people can be trusted to do the right thing. In a low trust society, banks would have to default to not letting you take out any money when they cannot check your balance, but that causes inconvenience for the honest people. I fear that we will travel further down that road if we do not hold ourselves up to the standards of a high trust society.
 
The naivety of the above is breathtaking.

We’re talking about thieving people, but lovely people, the type of lovely people that Sinn Fein panders to.

These people saw on sites like Reddit and other social media that Bank of Ireland had a technical issue and went out of their way to make unauthorised withdrawals (i.e. steal) from Bank of Ireland. Such was the chaos, the Gardai had to show-up.

Their credit ratings should be destroyed, and their accounts with Bank of Ireland and Revolut should be shut-down. Let them see how things pan out with no access to banking or finance.
 
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In practice what will happen is this.

The account holders will not be able to make any further payments or withdrawals until the stolen money is returned.
Many of these account holders will just open a new account elsewhere and divert their salaries or social welfare payments.
If they don't open them in time, their salary or welfare payments will reduce the outstanding balance.

BoI won't close the accounts while there is a deficit in it.

BoI will write to these people who abandon their account, but in practice, they won't be able to do much about it if the people don't voluntarily return the money.

For those who used Revolut to withdraw money, Revolut should check the account and close their Revolut account if the transaction was out of line with the account holders usual transactions.

Brendan
 
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