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Offaly – Money laundering hub of Ireland
Read more about: Corruption, Crime, Economy, Laoighis-Offaly, Northern Ireland 
The trial in Cork of Ted Cunningham, accused of laundering proceeds from the Northern Bank raid, heard detailed and sometimes bizarre testimony from the prosecution today — much of it drawn from transcripts of Garda interviews. The most interesting twist is the return of the name of Phil Flynn, onetime chairman of Bank of Scotland’s Ireland operation. Cunningham alleged in an interview that Flynn was the brains of the laundering operation, which was organised around delivery of huge quantities of sterling to various points in County Offaly, whereupon they would be picked up and then show up as investments in non-existent overseas enterprises made via Cunningham’s financial management business. It’s important to remember that Phil Flynn was an important cog in the Bertie Ahern machine, an experienced industrial dispute problem solver — albeit in the era of “whatever you’re having yourself lads” for which we are now paying by the price. But anyway, is it too unkind to speculate that the relaxed ethical attitude at the top of the Irish banking system is not a million miles removed from the practices now being exposed in the Northern Bank laundering trial?
We are so punch drunk with endless scams, corruption,rip-offs,incompetance,con-jobs that this trial hardly registers on the radar.Everything is closely linked to everything else and the cross contamination is so bad that I think we should just send for the IMF. No use voting Labour—they will just go into Govt with FF and the last position will be worse than the first.
Wasn’t Flynn vice president of Sinn Fein during the Eighties? Not that that has anything to do with this.
You are right. The similarities are there; small secretive elites, that believed that they could operate beyond the law, and did. A nudge; a wink; turning a blind eye; an entrenched policy of omerta; atotal dsregard for the rule of law; a tame and complaint media (not least RTE).
I am proud to be Irish (I think…still) – but these latest happenings have only proved what I have always suspected – that the country is inherently corrupt from top to bottom. It is time that the old order was swept aside once and for all.
Talk about money laundering…sure it must be obvious to all that the whole country is one big money laundry and the ordinary Joe Sixpack is working in it for peanuts…that’s if he has a job at all!