Anglo Irish Bank chairman Sean FitzPatrick has shown little remorse over the long-term implications of boom-time lending by banks.

In June 2005, a 23-year old primary schoolteacher borrowed eight times her €30,000 a year salary in order to buy her first home. As The Sunday Business Post reported at the time, Helen Gahan was working four jobs to pay off her mortgage.

Besides her full-time day job, Gahan was also working part-time in a shop, giving grinds and providing a babysitting service to help meet her hefty mortgage repayments.

She had taken out a 35-year mortgage at an interest rate of 3.1 per cent. She was able to obtain the €248,000 mortgage because her dad had gone guarantor for €100,000 of the loan.

Yet even after putting some of her dad’s assets on the line and stretching out her mortgage over three and half decades, the repayments - €950 a month on the home in Ratoath, Co Meath - represented a whopping 50 per cent of Gahan’s after-tax income.

In August that year, TV personality Eddie Hobbs presented Rip Off Republic, which highlighted the numerous ways in which ordinary people were paying over-the-top prices for practically everything - from houses to groceries.

My hunch has always been that it was the Helen Gahans of this world, and their families and friends, who tuned into Rip-Off Republic in their droves, when they could have been out enjoying the balmy summer evenings. (Full disclosure: this writer was a consultant on the programme.)

If the programme was popular with the punters, it came under fierce attack from the establishment.

But while the politicians had the smarts to back off after taking the public’s temperature, some in the business community could not conceal their anger - none more so than Anglo Irish Bank chairman Sean FitzPatrick, banker to many of the country’s leading property developers.

Some businessmen might have paused to ask whether it was wise to continue lending massive sums of money to property developers when ordinary people were increasingly screaming that, all around them, things were becoming unaffordable.

But FitzPatrick chose not to listen to the message, preferring instead to attack the messenger. In a speech delivered at the Irish Times Property Advertising Awards in September 2005, he took a pot-shot at RTE for giving Hobbs a platform.

‘‘This is not good. I’d genuinely worry that much of the nonsense he peddled would gain common currency, and that the wholly unbalanced Hobbsian perspective on Ireland of 2005 would fuel the anger of many of those who have failed to benefit from our economic success thus far,” he said.

‘‘This could also support a political agenda that is far removed from any of our long-established political parties.

‘‘Were that to happen, RTE should be held accountable, as the media generally must be, for the significant influence it has on the economic environment. This whole area needs attention.”

The message from FitzPatrick was clear. The public should not be told anything that would cause them to vote for a government that was not to his liking. And RTE would be held accountable if they did.

The latter part of this message was particularly chilling for journalists, considering that Anglo Irish Bank director Fintan Drury was, at that time, chairman of the RTE Authority.

At any rate, it would appear that FitzPatrick and his chief executive, David Drumm, continued to lend large sums of money to developers to build homes and offices that consumers and businesses were struggling to afford.

Then, of course, interest rates rose sharply, effectively putting the nail in the coffin of the Irish property market and raising doubts in investors’ minds about future profits at Irish banks in general and Anglo Irish Bank in particular.

However, instead of addressing the problem, FitzPatrick and his team appeared to be in denial, with Drumm berating the doom and gloom merchants in an interview with Business & Finance magazine.

This was despite the fact that the growing problems in the property market were, by then, clearly visible to anyone who could read the many auctioneers’ For Sale signs.

Meanwhile, international investors were in no doubt about what was happening and dumped Anglo Irish Bank’s shares in large numbers. They could see the writing on the wall for our massively overvalued Irish property market. They reckoned that, if Anglo Irish Bank had to call in its security on loans where borrowers could not meet the repayments, that security would be worth a lot less than the loans it secured.

The more the share prices fell, the more nervous depositors became. Eventually, corporate depositors voted with their feet, taking billions of euro off deposit with Anglo Irish Bank and other Irish institutions in the run-up to ‘Meltdown Monday’.

This move resulted in the government offering a €400 billion guarantee to the entire Irish banking system, amid mounting fears in the banking community that Anglo Irish Bank could collapse - and that others could soon follow.

The taxpayer has had to pledge the €400 billion as a result of the errors made by banks abroad and at home - including Anglo Irish Bank - while there are fears that the taxpayer could also be called on to recapitalise some of the banks, as has happened in Britain.

Yet on RTE radio last weekend, FitzPatrick only grudgingly thanked taxpayers for their largesse and refused to apologise for his mistakes. He evidently failed to see that the policies pursued by his bank under his stewardship were part of the problem, even though matters were certainly made much worse by the international credit crunch.

You might have thought that FitzPatrick would have exited stage left blushing. But incredibly, just a few days after the taxpayer was forced to bail him out, FitzPatrick was quoted in the Irish Times advising the government to cut corporation tax and tackle the sacred cows of universal child benefit, state pensions and medical cards for the over-70s.

You can only wonder what the Helen Gahans and their dads of this world make of FitzPatrick - who defended the policies that left her shouldering hefty mortgage payments and him exposed to a €100,000 potential liability if she defaulted - advising the government to tax her child benefit if she has kids, to remove his medical card and cut his pension, even as they are shouldering the cost of the €400 billion bank bailout.

At the time of writing, Anglo Irish shares were down 80 per cent from their 12-month high. This has left a big hole in the pockets of investors, including presumably many of the country’s pension funds, which are supposed to plug the gaps left by the state pension that FitzPatrick now wants to cut.

Meanwhile, FitzPatrick won’t be feeling too much financial pain. Having extracted so much in pay and shares while at the helm of Anglo Irish Bank, he became one of the richest men in the country - with a personal fortune estimated at more than €70 million, according to the Sunday Times Rich List.