Letter: Reality check

A recent edition of Vanity Fair had a superb in-depth article on the Irish financial crisis by one Michael Lewis. In it he recounts how an investor went to bed one night late in September of 2008 accepting (without rancour) that he was now 50 per cent poorer; he woke up the next morning to find the Irish government was going to "safeguard all deposits", and he was now much better off than he anticipated.

I'm not a trained economist, but at the time I thought it was rather rash of Dublin to make this promise; and as we now know, Ireland is a train wreck.

When Icesave got into trouble our government, for some reason, decided to pay Icesave's UK depositors what they would otherwise have lost. Why? These depositors put their money voluntarily into Icesave; shares go down as well as up and banks struggle as well as flourish.

The world financial crisis has cost me at least 15,000 which, as a small businessman and at my time of life, is a serious amount of money. But I'm not expecting money from the government.

I heard an Icelander asking a few days ago why he should be expected to pay money on behalf of an organisation he had nothing to do with.

If the UK takes Iceland to court, I hope "we" (the UK) lose and are less hasty in the future about paying off debts of this nature.

Sinclair C Dunnett

Culduthel Road

Inverness