In 2003, Ireland was just on the cusp of its expansive kitchen island era. Harvey Nichols was scouting around for a location for its first Dublin store. This was the peak moment for taxi drivers to tell you about their “little places” in Bulgaria or Puglia. Plans were floated that year for a U2 Tower on Sir John Rogerson’s Quay. One submission envisioned a giant Tetris block-like structure floating over the Liffey with a roof garden stretching 78 metres above the city – “the trees within are visible, rising up to the clouds”, as the architects put it. As a society, we had a bad case of the PT Barnums. No dream was too big or too preposterous.

And no less fantastical a set of edifices than those floating monuments and recording studios in the clouds were the towering loan books of Irish banks. Irish Nationwide’s soared to €4.248 billion in 2003; Anglo’s was a whopping €18.1 billion, up 34 per cent in one year. “Asset quality remains robust,” chief executive Seán FitzPatrick confidently stated with a smirk at Anglo’s AGM.

Taoiseach Bertie Ahern quipped in 2003 that he had not recently encountered “a bank or financial institution that was poor”. Irish people didn’t feel particularly strapped either: credit card debt had risen nearly three quarters of a billion euro in just three years. All that would soon change, but warning bells are hard to hear over the brash braying of politicians and men in striped shirts at banking AGMs. The banks’ biggest worry at that point seemed to be not that property prices might fall, but that they might run out of people to whom they could lend........

© The Irish Times