“There have been too many things that troubled me and continue to trouble me for the self examination that is part of the book not to incorporate a degree of angst.”

Fintan Drury was an acclaimed journalist  – presenting Morning Ireland in his 20s – before starting another successful career in business but the success  – and the failures – came at a cost.

His book which has just been published, See-Saw, is subtitled -A Perspective on Success, Leadership and Corporate Culture. It provides that perspective, but it also portrays a man, as he acknowledged in this podcast, who has had to reflect on his role in two of Ireland’s most high profile companies, one  – Paddy Power – a resounding success and the other, Anglo Irish Bank.

 “Was it right to be influential in growing a business that I wouldn’t have wanted knocking on my family’s door?’ he writes in the book about Paddy Power and it is a topic he discusses at length in the podcast.

“If I was presenting Morning Ireland and I was interviewing myself it would be the thing I would find hardest to defend.”

Drury was, too, a friend, confidante and unpaid adviser to Brian Cowen. If there is a hero in the book, it is Cowen. He isn’t spared from criticism, but he offers a counterpoint to much of what is in it: Cowen is a man of integrity, Drury stresses, which made the criticism of the game of golf he played with Sean FitzPatrick at Druids Glen in July 2008- while understandable – straightforward for Drury to defend in his own mind.

Drury by then had left the Anglo board, but the professional nemesis of his association was still to come.

When he was chairing Paddy Power, on the board of Anglo and running his own business, Drury walked with what he says was a ‘strut”. He is a different man now, a man who hopes to provide insight into what went wrong in those companies for very different reasons and also offers a way for gambling to be curbed.

I knew Fintan Drury for many years, initially from his time as a football agent. He was, as we discussed, always confident in protecting his clients, although when I said he was supremely confident, he was surprised, that was never how he saw himself. It certainly isn’t how he sees himself today. This conversation tried to reconcile the man who was such a success in business with the man who possesses “the worry gene” and frets about what he left behind.

The Corporate Warrior

Dion Fanning: Reading your book, there’s a term you use about yourself a few times during it, “corporate warrior”. “I was in full corporate corporate warrior mode,” you say. “I donned my corporate warrior blinkers”. As I read this and read through the book, I wondered how would you describe yourself today?

Fintan Drury: One of the points I make is that there’s a strut that sometimes goes with that corporate warrior piece. And I would hope that now today, I’ve lost the strut, I still work in business sometime. I’m also doing some media and journalistic work again. And I think when I’m working in business, I still am clothed to a degree in the corporate warrior gear. But I am approaching business in a very different way now to at least part of the time that I was in business during the course of my career, over those 30 years that I profiled in the book. SO I suspect that there wouldn’t be a perceptible change for people who have worked with me over that time and are still working with me in a business environment.

DF: Really?

FD: Other than the strut is gone. At least I hope so.

DF: But the term, as you use it in the book, you don’t use it approvingly of yourself.

FD: No, nor did I intend to. Yes, it’s about arrogance, it’s about a belief system, which can be all encompassing, and can smother you and smother your more natural instincts to be questioning, not just of others, but of yourself and questioning of a lot of your actions. So I believe that essentially, when you identify that term and pick it out of a relatively lengthy book, it’s a really relevant point in terms of the title of the book See-Saw, which is this notion of a movement from one Fintan Drury to another Fintan Drury but, as with a seesaw, it’s constantly moving.

I believe there’s still very much part of the corporate piece within who I am today, and how I conduct myself today. But there’s a greater sensitivity to the wider needs, that you serve when you’re in business, and when you’re in business life. And I think that what I hope has come through in the book is a sense that, for at least a period of my business career, and that at particular points in my business career, and certainly in particular areas of my business life to date, I allowed that instinctive sense of balance to be lost, or at least that the seesaw was tilted to one side for too long.

DF: Was it because you believed…you were so convinced in your own integrity, that you believe you were acting in with integrity all the time, and that people around you then – and that you are representing and that you are working with – must also be acting with integrity, and you fail to possibly examine all of that as completely as you could have?

FD: Integrity is, first of all, you know, so personal, morality is so personal. And what I’ve tried to explore in the book is this idea that acting ethically, in any walk of life, ethically in journalism, ethically in business, only takes you so far and that there are certain areas of any work that you do which require a greater level of personal responsibility and a greater level of personal examination, which is around the issue of the rightness of what you’re doing, the correctness of what you’re doing. So obviously, I discuss at length, the challenge of gambling, and having been a successful chairman of Paddy Power bookmakers for six years, and successful by any stretch of the imagination from a corporate point of view because the share value grew, the business grew.

DF: An incredible success story, well run, run with all the right checks and balances.

FD: Exactly so that the ethical piece was met completely. But the much bigger for me personally, the moral issue around what gambling represented and the challenge that that presented from the point of view of society, which is now becoming much more potent and much more complex. I never stopped to ask myself about that and about the veracity of what I was doing, not that it wasn’t ethical and done properly. It was. Everything was done correctly. But I personally, when I reflect on it, realise that I should never have been involved in it.

The FAI and Denis O’Brien

What we need in a country of this size is we need people like Denis O’Brien and JP McManus and others to make contributions when they can towards the development of sport, and the arts and other areas where we we need the support of private sector benefactors. But the problem with that [When O’Brien was contributing to the salary of Ireland manager Giovanni Trapattoni and then Martin O’Neill], which wasn’t his problem, the problem was that funding the team manager, that’s a basic cost that every association must be able to meet. And if they’re not able to fund the the hiring of a manager to run the national team and his coterie of coaches, etc then there’s a problem in the financial management of the association. Unwittingly, Denis O’Brien’s contribution to the FAI over that period, camouflaged the extent to which there was a problem in the funding of the FAI.

All of us – even those of us who were doubtful about the financial position of the association, were very doubtful about the culture around the management of the Association and the welfare of the sport – we could not have known just how bad it was, until it was too late. And the private sector funding therefore, should be towards developmental areas in any sport, but not towards the basic costs. The basic salary costs, the basic overhead of any sport, because there’s a risk that that funding can camouflage financial problems.

Brian Cowen

DF: You write in the book that “I followed Brian Cowen, because I believed in him. I was wrong because he lacked the ruthlessness necessary”. It’s one of the few lines in the book where you’re not making a very strong case when you’re writing about Brian Cowen for Brian Cowen. And would you say – was there any point when you were advising Brian Cowen that you fell into the same trap you did with Brian Kerr, in terms of your distaste for the criticism of them – your distaste for how he was being portrayed in a way you didn’t believe was a true reflection of the politician – clouded your ability to offer him clear advice?

FD: The important distinction to make is that I was a paid adviser to Brian Kerr, I was his agent, as we would say, in football. I was never a paid adviser to Brian Cowen. I did some work for him in the early years when he was in the department of what is now public enterprise. But over the period I really focus on in the book, I was just a friend who he trusted to give him advice on the wider political issues, partly, as I described in the book, because I was outside the Fianna Fail family. And because I was always straight with him and direct with him. But I wasn’t a paid adviser. So having said that, I did have influence, I was one of a number of people who would have had influence on him and who he would have turned to me and we would have discussed issues from.

DF: You were writing speeches for him.

FD: I was writing speeches for him. But you know that the line that you quoted is the most important point really. Because the reason I speak and write well of him in the book is because I saw at close quarters how hard he worked. I saw at close quarters how committed to public service he always was. I saw at close quarters the extent to which he put himself – when everything was falling apart for the country at the time of the financial crisis and he was Taoiseach – he put his own interests and the interests of the Fianna Fail party, which was after his family, the most important thing to him in his life. He put them to one side, and he focused exclusively on doing what was right, what he believed to be right for the country. And he took decisions which he knew meant that he was exiting politics forever. He knew he was finishing his own career by taking the really important fundamental, tough decisions that needed to be taken. More than anything, in terms of what you need to be a leader, what Brian lacked was ruthlessness.

DF: In terms of what?

FD: In every respect. In terms of interpersonal discussions. In terms of bidding people farewell who needed to be exited.

DF: He was slow to move against Bertie?

FD: Oh, yeah, but that’s slightly. I write this, I think, I hope very clearly in the book, I was passionately of the view that he should have moved against Bertie Ahern, politically, but also because I thought it was the right thing for him to do. When I talk about the ruthlessness, that’s not really where I’m focusing on. I’m focusing on, he’s a very compassionate person. And his first instinct is to trust people, and to be supportive of people. And to think the best of people. Now, so much of what I say about Brian in the book runs counter too much of the public profile and the public narrative.

DF: You’ve a line in the book that you say Garrett Fitzgerald said he was the best Minister for Foreign Affairs.

FD: Which he did.

DF: And I was so struck by that, because I was like, “What?” But I read an article last night, a review of a biography of Brian Cowen by Garrett Fitzgerald, where he makes that point. And as somebody who’s, ok an unpaid adviser.

FD: A friend.

DF: How was all that integrity, all that ability, how did that not get transmitted to the people? Was it just a function of the time when he happened to become Taoiseach, and it was at the time of the crash, and nobody wanted anything except their understandable anger to be heard?

FD: I think it was a number of things. That was certainly a contributor, I mean, the level of public anger which was largely justified towards people in business, particularly people in banking, I know because I was there. But people in politics, pretty much across the board. But remember, Brian had been finance minister, and then he had moved from being finance minister to being Taoiseach. And so he so he was right in the vortex of the public disdain for the establishment, and most particularly the political establishment.

But in addition, as I refer to in the book, Brian had a dislike of personal professional management. Brian Cowen did not want to be spending public money on public relations for himself, you know, dressing himself up literally and metaphorically to present an image which would make him more appreciated by the general public. And that was right through his career.

Right through his career, Dion, his view was, This is who I am. I represent the people of Tullamore, at some stage, I represent the people of Ireland, in various government departments as Minister, and ultimately he became Taoiseach. I’m the leader of the country and I am not going to pander to a media view, as he would have seen it, and there’s a tremendous honesty and integrity to that. But, as you and I both know from our professional lives, it doesn’t…unfortunately, you do need to invest time and effort in that piece.

Druids Glen, Sean FitzPatrick and Brian Cowen

DF: One of the intersections in your life and in the book is the Brian Cowen overlap with the Anglo story, and in particular, the dinner and even more particularly the game of golf. Which reading again about, not just in your book, looking back. Nobody, nobody believed it was…

FD: Kosher

DF: It was kosher, and nobody believed it was possible. And everyone thought this is an outlandish, ridiculous statement to make, the idea that Sean FitzPatrick and Brian Cowen would play golf and that, for the duration of that day, they would not discuss Anglo Irish bank. Do you understand why people would find that ridiculous?

FD: Not only do I understand it, I acknowledge in the book that I understand it and I acknowledges it when I appeared in front of the banking inquiry that I understand exactly why people would find that difficult to believe. But as I wrote in The Currency a few weeks ago on another matter, which involved politicians, Simon Coveney in particular, that there are times when this notion of, you know, there’s no smoke without fire, that that’s just not the case.

And so to me, the whole furore at that time could have been dealt with so simply by the presentation of the agenda that was set for that meeting on that day, which had no reference to banking whatsoever, number one. Number two, as Patrick Honohan has subsequently written, or said in an interview, he had a discussion around the same time with then Minister for Finance, Brian Lenihan and banking was never discussed. And it was like within weeks of the meeting in Druids Glen. And banking wasn’t discussed because it wasn’t the big issue that it became later. It was an issue definitely globally, there were pressures coming on, there’s no doubt about that.

DF: And you didn’t have to tell anybody, you didn’t have to say, there was an agenda there, you didn’t have to, beyond that, state this won’t be discussed on this day?

FD: it wouldn’t have crossed my mind or anybody else’s mind that we won’t discuss banking because the various people involved in this meeting – and then having dinner subsequently – are involved in banking, or were involved in banking in my case, because I was off the board at that stage.

It wouldn’t have even crossed our minds, because it was never going to be an issue that we would have discussed. But also, as I say a number of times in the book, you know, Brian Cowen and I spent a lot of time talking about a lot of political issues. I was the voice – I’m not saying I was the only one but I was the voice outside of Fianna Fail, outside of active politics that he listened to reasonably regularly. And we had a very clear understanding that we never discussed things where I was involved, which could compromise either of us. And that’s just the way – anyone who knows Brian. I say in the book, and I said it at the banking inquiry on two occasions in my evidence, there is nobody in this room who for a moment would question the integrity of Brian Cowen when it comes to decisions about the public welfare.

DF: And did you have people approach you because your connection to Brian Cowen thinking there was an advantage there?

FD: Oh, sure. Yeah. But I mean, that’s…there is an implication perhaps in the question that that’s a malevolent thing. Some people you know, that’s the way life works. At a particular point in time, people would have known that I was friendly with Brian, knew Brian, was involved with Brian in terms of advising, but I never had a phone call that I can recall certainly from anyone who asked me to do anything through Brian, which was inappropriate, and I was never put in that position.

DF: Would that proximity to power have assisted in that strut you talked about earlier? The fact that there’s there’s these intersections all over the place that, I don’t mean that in a nefarious way.

FD: No, I don’t I don’t think so. I think that the strut was more to do with…I was successful in business. People were starting to approach me and ask me to take on other roles, you know, and you’re cock of the walk, if you like. And it’s hard to step away from that. And that’s where I think, as I reflect on it, that’s where the disappointment in myself…We talked earlier in this interview about angst. The disappointment in myself was that the journalistic instincts that I had from a very young age even before I started in journalism, my curiosity, which was something that was nurtured in my home life as a youngster growing up, and then in university, but certainly developed hugely under, you know, great people like Mike Burns, Kevin Healy, and Gerry Barry, in particular, in the newsroom in RTE. They really cultivated that sense of curiosity. Somehow when I went into this arena of business, and the generation of profits and the management of business interests in order to make a return for the shareholders, in some cases including myself that I lost that capacity to be quizzical – I wouldn’t say I lost it – but it was certainly dulled and diminished. And that upsets me.

Sean FitzPatrick

DF: Let’s talk about that in terms of Anglo, because you say, of Sean FitzPatrick, you use this formulation at the start of the book. “I followed Sean Fitzpatrick, I was wrong, he was not the person I thought him to be”. Can you forgive Sean FitzPatrick now?

FD: It’s not a matter of forgiveness. Somebody contacted me from Queen’s University a couple of years ago, he was doing a PhD on on the idea of apologies, and how valuable it is for people who have been involved in something that’s gone wrong in the public domain to make apologies or to apologise or not. And I think the more important thing than forgiving or apologising is to assess and to learn from what went wrong in a particular situation. And that if you have had multiple experiences, some good, a lot not so good and you have a capacity to write, which I hope I have. To articulate some of that and expose some of that in a way which is meant to be certainly constructive. That some of these errors don’t reoccur, or at least are less likely to recur. Or that people who are embarking on their careers in business as I did decades ago, are maybe better informed, and better at seeing around corners the way I didn’t.

DF: How much of that involves challenging a charismatic leader?

FD: It’s a really important thing. And I think that, you know, I mean, it’s not for me to forgive Sean FitzPatrick. My point about Sean FitzPatrick is really that he as I described, he was, you know, he was a phenomenally talented person who did achieve great things. I think in the same way as I tried to describe right at the end of the book, that success distorts most people, not everybody – not everybody by any stretch of the imagination – so perhaps most people is too strong. But a lot of people can find that their life or their world or their approach to life can be distorted by success.

And I believe that in the case of Anglo you know, I let Sean Fitzpatrick down, as well as Sean FitzPatrick let me down. I let Sean FitzPatrick down because I was the one non executive director of that company who understood about culture, who understood about corporate culture, who had in fact, as an advisor to Anglo before I became a non executive director in my days in Drury Communications along with Billy Murphy and Rosheen McGuckian had done a phenomenal piece of work on making Anglo more structured, more disciplined around communications, around the fabric of the way in which the organisation was managed.

So having been right at the head of that particular process, I’d become a non executive director. The company continues to grow and the growth then becomes stratospheric. And again, that capacity to question becomes diminished. And particularly because the man who’s at the head of the organisation is as charismatic as Sean was. It is in that sense that I say I let him down because I was the one non executive director who should have seen the cultural distortion that was happening within the bank.

You know, I started writing this book in my head the day I left the banking inquiry because I was so frustrated. There were many talented people asking me questions for three and a half, four hours or whatever length of time I was there, but they weren’t getting to the substantive issue, which was – what happened in this organisation that allowed it to fail so dramatically? Of course, it wasn’t the only one. I mean, this gets lost as well, you know, there was a general malaise within the financial services sector in Ireland at that time. Anglo clearly was, you know, the worst in class. But for me the origins of the book came pretty much as soon as I left.

DF: Why does that not happen at the banking inquiry? Why do people not want to address those issues?

FD: You know, if you look at what was going on, there were criminal court cases going on at the time there was there was, you know, there wwas a backdrop which made the inquiry, the members of inquiry, the chairman of the inquiry, nervous around what could or could not be said.

DF: You weren’t allowed, on the morning of the inquiry, you were told you couldn’t talk about.

FD: There were certain things I couldn’t talk about. And they were the things that I felt were most important, and they were the things that I’ve tried to try to cover in the book.

The Fall of the Corporate Warrior

DF: At what stage then does what happened at Anglo – because when I ask you, you know, can you forgive Sean FitzPatrick, I would also probably ask you about how you live with yourself with it. At what point does what happened at Anglo become, as you outline in the book, your “professional nemesis”, “traumatises me in ways I still struggle to understand”. “My standard working day had gone from one where I dealt with positive constructive things to labouring through seemingly endless threats to my integrity, and the family’s financial well being”. Over what period does that happen?

FD: The last piece of that, you know, was dealt with relatively quickly over, you know, over a number of years. I mean, the first part of that description still bothers me. And, you know, maybe I overthink it, I don’t know.

DF: You say you have a worry gene.

FD: Yeah, I do have a worry gene but I know, other colleagues from that time in the bank, who equally carry the burden of having been on that board at that time, over that period of time. You know, it’s a hard thing to in a small, particularly in a small community like Ireland, it’s a hard thing to ever completely move away from.

DF: You were in a bar one night talking to what you described as quite a well known entertainer.

FD: Yeah.

DF: What happened?

FD: We were chatting, and he just started talking about the banking debacle. It was probably around 2012, 2013, I’m guessing. And I said, as I always had done up to then and it doesn’t happen now, really. But if it did, I would still say, ‘By the way, in case you don’t know, I was a member of the board of Anglo Irish bank’. Because I think that’s fair to people that they know before they continue with their diatribe. And he just completely flipped. I mean, he said, you know, he never wanted to speak to me again. That was just kind of an acute example.

DF: What did you do?

FD: What could…I think I turned and, you know, finished my drink. But I mean, he left? And I understand that at one level, who knows what, you know, maybe his family had lost money in the bank? I don’t know.

DF: But what does it do to you? Because, you know, I’m thinking about the journey you’re on from the corporate warrior, if you like, but also the person I knew who would be – I know you maybe got too close to things – but absolutely supreme in your own, the way you projected yourself was always a supremely self confident person whose line they were projecting they had most belief and faith in. And then you’re sitting in a bar with somebody turning on you. Like, what does that do to you in terms of how you feel about yourself?

FD: Well, it was it was the degree to which that happened that was different to other similar experiences over the previous few years, and I sort of referenced that in the book. I don’t think that particular incident jarred with me or upset me. It was just, it was extraordinary the extent to which there was going to be no discussion, the discussion he wants to have stopped as soon as I told him, which I felt was the honourable thing to say.

And it’s interesting you know – and you and I have known each other a long time – and it’s interesting that you would describe me or profile me in that way, because I accept that there are many people who would have perceived me in that way. But actually, I would think that I would have been supremely professional about the people whose interest I was representing. But I wouldn’t have been supremely confident in who I was or how I was going about my business. I’m not saying I wouldn’t have been confident in my own abilities, I was and I am. But it’s interesting that you perceived me and you use the term supremely because that’s something that I’m a little bit surprised by.

DF: Really?

FD: Yeah.

DF: Why?

FD:  I guess because it makes me feel that, you know, that it goes back to this point that you talked about early on in our chat around being like, when we talked about Brian Kerr, that the level of belief in the position I would have been articulating was so strong that I wasn’t open to seeing…

DF: What I was getting at more was I think you took great pride in your own integrity. And I know Jonathan Franzen says integrity is a neutral term, the hyena has great integrity, you know, it’s pure hyena. But I remember once having a conversation with you, and I can’t remember who I referenced in terms of something, I made a reference to some UK football agent and you just went ‘Don’t fucking put me in the same sentence as that guy’.

FD: I remember who that was too and I would repeat it except we’re on air ]laughs]. I wouldn’t use your language. But I would give you the same response.

DF: What I’m getting at is as somebody who had felt – and this isn’t this isn’t a criticism – that you’re acting with a sense of good values, and promoting people who you’ve helped share those values, that suddenly you were in the middle of something that represented everything that people felt had destroyed the country.

FD: The interesting thing about that, is it the example you’ve given – and I remember it – football is a shitty business and football in the UK is full of, I mean, really full of people who are just only interested in turning a buc and they don’t really give a toss about any anything else. Ok? So when you would have referenced somebody else in that arena, my reaction would have been as you’ve profiled it because in that arena, I would have regarded myself as being like super whiter than white.

I mean, completely and utterly driven by values that were largely…there are other people like me, many people like me in professional football, but certainly back then there was a very significant percentage of them who had no integrity at all. So that would have been part of the reason for the reaction.

DF: But to go back to what we’re talking about now and the Anglo thing and what that did for your own view of your integrity.

FD: Yeah, because ultimately, this was a catastrophic failure. And yes, it was a failure of the leadership and I try and make the distinction in the book, even in business about, you know, if you’re a board member, and you’re chairman. And so, I was a board member of Anglo, so I had left, I had retired from the board six months before the implosion, that doesn’t change the fact that I was there over a period of time, when the leadership of the bank started to fail. And I was part of the leadership cohort. And so you have to take responsibility.

DF: There’s a lot of angst in the book. What are you most proud of?

FD: In terms of my business career? The thing I was best at was what I did in the in the first part of my career, which was my time as a journalist in RTE. I mean I’m immensely proud of that, even though it’s a long time ago.

DF: How much do you regret? -or maybe you dodged a bullet, I don’t know- but how much do you regret Brian Cowen, you talked about it in the book, you wanted him to offer you a job when he became Taoiseach. You applied to join Fianna Fail. But that was the thing you desperately wanted him to…

FD: I wouldn’t say desperately wanted. But I did want and expect that he would tap me on the shoulder at some point and say, Look, I want you to come in.

DF: And be what?

FD: You know, probably in, my arrogance, you know, be the commissar or the chief of staff or whatever. The term wouldn’t have meant a huge amount. I kind of knew what I was good at, and what I could have done, or felt I could have done. But that also betrayed an interest that I’d always had in politics. I just love politics. I always was interested in politics. I suppose my biggest regret professionally is that I didn’t have a cut at representative politics. But in terms of the thing I’m most proud of? Yeah, definitely my work as a journalist.

See-Saw is published by Ballpoint Press