The FitzPatrick Tapes The Rise and Fall of One Man, One Bank, and One Country

THE BOOK THAT HELPED BRING DOWN BRIAN COWEN One day in May 2009, Sean FitzPatrick - the disgraced former chief executive and chairman of Anglo Irish Bank - sat down to lunch in a Holiday Inn in Dublin. Across the table sat Tom Lyons, a business reporter with the Sunday Times. Seven months later, the two met for the first of what would be seventeen formal, tape-recorded interviews over the course of 2010. In these interviews, FitzPatrick talked at length and in detail about his banking experiences and philosophy, his colleagues and clients, his investments, his public disgrace, his arrest and his bankruptcy. Lyons and his colleague Brian Carey, who have been covering the Anglo story brilliantly since the bank's crisis began in 2007, have drawn on the FitzPatrick tapes and on their many sources within Anglo, the state and the business community to tell the story of that crisis - and of the man who became the face of it. 'Few books have caused a sensation like the surprise publication of The FitzPatrick Tapes . . . a great read' Irish Independent 'Some hold that the job of a good journalist is to scoop rivals. Others value the more cerebral skills of joining the dots, collecting a well-researched maze of facts and connecting them coherently. The irritating news is that the authors of The FitzPatrick Tapes have succeeded at both' Kathy Sheridan, Irish Times 'Excellent . . . Tom Lyons and Brian Carey give FitzPatrick enough rope to hang himself and he does exactly that' Neil Callanan, Sunday Tribune 'Tom Lyons and Brian Carey have done fine work in The FitzPatrick Tapes, using FitzPatrick's own words to display the shabby reality of the banker, his cronies and their political servants' Sunday Independent