In recent days, the special liquidators of Irish Bank Resolution Corporation (IBRC) handed over a further  €250 million of surplus cash to the Exchequer. 

The payment brought total distributions in recent years to €360 million. This is in addition to the €1.7 billion received since IBRC was put into liquidation in 2013.

The disclosures were made by Paschal Donohoe, the finance minister, last week, when he published the eleventh annual progress update on the liquidation of IBRC.

Given the tumultuous world we live in and the fact that so much has happened over the past decade, it is easy to forget the significance of the liquidation of the bank, both economically and politically. 

When you strip it all back, the liquidation helped Ireland regain its economic sovereignty to a degree that was previously unimaginable. It also revealed an unknown level of international investor demand for distressed Irish assets. It set the floor for distressed assets. 

Consider this. 

When the bank was liquidated on February 6, 2013, the government thought as little as 10 per cent of its €21.7 billion loan book would be snapped up by cash-rich international buyers. 

In the end, they bought all but 10 per cent.

It showed that Ireland, despite the country’s financial collapse and external bailout, was not a complete disaster. Investors still wanted a piece of the action, albeit they acquired assets at knockdown prices.

In truth, the liquidation actually helped reduce the cost of borrowing and increased inward investment.

But it is worth remembering that the liquidation was central to a broader plan to restructure Ireland’s crippling national debt by staving off punitive interest payments on the cost of bailing out Anglo.

At the time, the decision to liquidate IBRC was still risky – even the European Central Bank believed there might have been an undiscovered €7 billion black hole within IBRC at the time of liquidation.

A decade ago, I sat down with Michael Noonan, then the finance minister, to discuss the decision to liquidate the bank.

The way Noonan told it, the decision to liquidate the bank was down to the so-called “promissory notes”. 

The prom notes, all €30.7 billion of them, had been designed to bail out Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Nationwide.

They were essentially IOUs used to rescue both Anglo and Nationwide at the height of the banking crisis. But they had gone spectacularly wrong, exposing Ireland to €3.1 billion in annual repayments. 

Noonan needed to stop the payments – for the economy and for the country politically. 

But it was impossible to stop the payments as IBRC had a banking licence. 

“You can’t do what you want to do, minister, because it’s a bank,” several European officials told Noonan.

“But what if it’s not a bank?” Noonan countered. “What if it had no banking licence?”

“I started figuring out how I could make sure it was not a bank, and liquidation sounded like a good idea,” Noonan told me.

So, he conjured up an idea to revoke the banking licence. This involved the liquidation. 

Slowly, the idea caught on – both in Europe and Dublin. By October 2012, a select number of officials in Noonan’s department had drafted legislation that would liquidate Anglo Irish Bank overnight, thereby obsoleting its banking licence.

It turned out to be a masterstroke. 

As part of the approach, Noonan secured agreement from his European counterparts to renegotiate the prom notes into long-term government bonds on which the principal did not have to be paid back for up to 40 years, thereby very significantly reducing the annual €3.1 billion bill.

Meanwhile, Eamonn Richardson and Kieran Wallace and their team at KPMG had come up with a plan to liquidate a bank that had a loan book of €21.7 billion within a matter of months.

“We had to plan on a very high level,” Richardson later told me. “There was no roadmap or plan for this kind of job, no real precedent. We do 25 fixed charge receiverships a week here. You know exactly what the challenges are and how you do the job. But there was no roadmap for IBRC.”

Eight members of the IBRC management team had their contracts terminated. The contracts of all the bank’s 1,000 staff were immediately terminated, before they were rehired on short-term contracts.

Before auctioning off the €21.7 billion, the liquidators wanted to see what parts of it investors might be willing to buy.

Following the consultation with potential buyers, the liquidators broke up the mammoth loan book into six distinct classes. Each would be auctioned separately; many of those classes would be divided into a further 52 sub-lots.

The government had underwritten the liquidation, putting €21.9 billion of bonds in the Central Bank to cover the process. If the proceeds were less, the taxpayer was on the hook to top up any further loss. 

“It would not have been our fault if the loans did not sell, but it would have been our responsibility,” Wallace later told me. “Our job was to get as close to repaying that facility as we could.”

All told, the liquidators had managed to sell 90 per cent of the entire €21.7 billion loan book. Less than €2 billion remained unsold at the end of the process, a staggering reversal of the initial estimates.

A decade ago, I asked Wallace if he knew why investor demand had risen so massively over the past year. “It is hard to know,” he replied.

“But when you put €22.5 billion of loans out for sale at one time, in a strange way, you create your own market. You create your own interest, in retrospect, maybe there is a lesson to be learned that if you have something large to do, put it all out at one time and create your own market.”

The process turned out to be successful – politically and economically.

Last week, the progress update said that “further distributions will be made as the remaining assets are realised”.

“At inception, the IBRC loan portfolio had a par value of €21 billion. At the end of January 2025, that value stood at €3.1 billion, representing a significant reduction in the overall loan portfolio,” said Donohoe. “I want to take this opportunity to formally acknowledge the exceptional progress made by the special liquidators of the IBRC in maximising the return on IBRC’s portfolio to date.”

The world has moved on from those dark days when the State had to liquidate a bank to avoid interest payments. But it is important to remember the lessons. The decision to liquidate took political bravery. It would have been easy to complain and keep paying the interest bills. 

Noonan showed guts and guile. As we face an uncertain time again, there are lessons there. 

Elsewhere last week…

In the latest episode of the Sports Matters podcast series, I meet former rugby internationals Niall Woods and Marty Moore to discuss transitioning from professional sports. Woods, who played rugby for Leinster, London Irish, and Ireland, has lived through this shift twice — once as an athlete and later as an advisor, having worked with the players’ unions in both England and Ireland before founding his sports agency, Navy Blue Sports. Marty Moore, a prop who earned two Six Nations titles with Ireland and played for Leinster, Wasps, and Ulster, recently retired and transitioned into his family business, Lockerfix. They shared their insights on the nuanced challenges of life after professional sport. Sports Matters is sponsored by the law firm Whitney Moore.

As many Irish accountancy firms consolidate under private equity ownership, Declan de Lacy is setting up his own firm Fides. It will initially focus on insolvency, property and corporate finance before expanding. He shared his story with Tom.

Between 2015 and 2018 Getty claimed over €31.4m in foreign royalty withholding tax as a deductible expense in its Irish corporation tax returns. Revenue is fighting an uphill battle to block the move. Francesca had the details.

Ireland is among the world’s most tightly regulated rental markets. As it reviews its rent control regime, international lessons detail that without reform, efforts to protect tenants may end up worsening the housing crisis, according to Ronan.