Bio | Gerry Moloney | A Game of Consequences
Who is Gerry Moloney?
I was born in Cobh in Cork - does that make me a Holy Grounder?. As my father worked in a bank the family moved about and I grew up in Skibbereen, Rathdowney and Portlaoise. I spent five years boarding in Cistercian College Roscrea, and then joined the bank. I spent most of my time in Investment Fund Management with AIB. In 1987 they appointed me to head their new stockbroking firm Allied Irish Securities.
I left AIB in 1993 to explore new worlds in the consultancy business, an exploration that took me to many emerging markets from Slovenia through Albania, Hungary, and Estonia to Russia, as well as the Far East, Africa and the Caribbean. I also spent five years as Investment Director of Enterprise Ireland, and I now am a non executive director of some Investment Funds in Dublin’s International Financial Services sector.
More recently I took up creative writing, partly to use the right hemisphere of my brain. I enjoy reading (a Ulysses anorak!) and travelling – the annual Tanglewood Festival being a real draw for my wife Anne and I. We live in Howth just outside Dublin, close to our 2 daughters and 2 grandchildren. A Game of Consequences is my first novel.
Why did you write it?
An often expressed opinion is that ‘all bankers are crooks’. or are ‘at it’, or ‘are out for themselves’. Having spent many years working at different levels in a bank, my view is that is patently untrue, but if I’m right, how come the banking disaster happened?
Why didn’t ‘someone’ intervene?
My conclusion is that most of them simply sleepwalked their way into it by keeping their heads down and not challenging effectively what was happening around them.
One can argue that some combination of incompetence, greed, lack of moral backbone was the issue. It seems to me however that the principal problem was that they prioritised misplaced blind adherence to corporate loyalty over taking personal responsibility.
Who do you think it will appeal to?
I believe A Game of Consequences should be of interest to anyone who is interested in gaining an understanding of how such a mess could have occurred in the first place, and how large bureaucratic organisations can have the effect of entrapping its members to toe the party line to a point where when a problem arises, they feel disempowered to ‘do the right thing’. (This comment should not be considered to be confined to banks!).
Anyone who has worked in a large organisation has learned from experience that what gets rewarded tends to be enthusiastic adherence to the party line (some might say, yes-men) and those who take a contrary view can be sidelined – to use a euphemism.
The issues around challenging an organisation’s culture are all too clear.
My novel should also appeal to the reader who will relish the excitement of the action: the boardroom tussles, the naked power, the greed, and the political intrigue. It is entertaining, humorous, and goes a long way to explaining how the disaster happened.