"Tax collectors and bankers will never be loved outside their own circles, but there is a need for balance in our view of these things, " he said. When companies in other sectors made a profit, the Taoiseach went on, they were praised for what they had achieved. "But a bank with a similar headline profit is assumed to be doing it at an adverse cost to its customers."

The millionaire Taoiseach is not wrong. People do assume, when they hear about the profits made by banks, that as customers they have been ripped off at some point along the way. The reason they assume this is because quite often they have been.

This is why there would have been so many different reactions to the praise doled out to the banks by Ahern, which he reiterated in the Dail during the week.

Some of us would have looked at the pretax profits made by AIB . . . 1.7bn in 2005 . . . and gasped in wonder at the 8m earned by executives in pay and bonuses last year. Is this the same bank which was run from time to time over the years by four tax dodgers who recently made tax settlements with the Revenue to the tune of more than 300,000? Is this really the kind of company the Taoiseach wants to be keeping, and praising?

Some of us will have recalled how AIB overcharged customers more than 34m across a range of areas over an eight-year period, while still more of us might dwell on the inquiry by High Court-appointed inspectors which found that National Irish Bank had facilitated tax-dodging and engaged in widespread overcharging. NIB employees told that inquiry that overcharging customers was "virtually standard practice", and that they would decide how much to overcharge a customer on the basis of how much of a "nuisance" he or she had been in the past. They even came up with a little name . . . "adjusting the decimal" . . . to describe tampering with interest rates.

I understand that as a millionaire, the father of a millionaire and the father-in-law of a millionaire, the Taoiseach does not have the same relations with the banks as the rest of us do, and that his exposure to them is confined mainly to turning up at their functions every now and again to tell them what great fellows they are.

(It's still mainly fellows, I'm afraid. ) But for a man who is often praised for having his finger on the pulse of the populace, his comments seemed remarkably off key and out of touch.

Even if people believe that Irish banking scandals are a thing of the past (and it is only a fortnight since this newspaper reported that Permanent TSB had been overcharging customers), there are enough concerns about the high level of bank charges and the ridiculous nature of some of them to keep Irish people stewing in their mistrust of banks for many decades to come.

My own response to Bertie Ahern's love letter to the banks was based on something that happened to me about 24 hours before he made his FIBI speech. Thinking that I might need to buy a suit, I attempted to withdraw money from the National Irish Bank on Lower Baggot Street in Dublin.

After a very long delay, the machine spewed out my card and a message popped up on screen telling me that the transaction could not be processed.

The money, however, was debited from my account, which is with the Bank Of Ireland. I rang, and rang, and rang both the NIB and BoI over the course of the week and was told, at various times, that it would take three days to sort the problem out, that it would take five days, that it would take 10 working days, that an investigation would be launched and that it was nothing to do with the National Irish Bank branch where the problem occurred, as they didn't fill and refill the machines. I was also told that there was no absolute guarantee that I would get my money back. The "investigation" would determine that.

Finally, after a week in which hundreds of euro of my money was being held without my permission by NIB, I decided to abuse my position as a national newspaper columnist. I contacted NIB's PR people and told them I was happy enough on the basis of dictionary definitions of the word "theft" to write a column accusing them of stealing money from me (just as they had from their customers years ago).

Did they have a response to this?

Within 45 minutes of contact with the PR firm, the money was back in my account. The following day, I received a call from NIB headquarters apologising for what had happened, but insisting very firmly that all the correct procedures had been followed.

The implication was that the return of my money so soon after the complaint was pure coincidence. I was also told that an agreement existed between the banks that permitted them to take 10 working days to return money acquired in such circumstances.

A few things strike me about all that. Would somebody who was not a journalist have received such personal attention after a complaint?

Would she or he have received their money back less than an hour after airing their grievances? What kind of disconnected thinking is going on within Irish banking that two weeks is regarded an acceptable time to hold onto money that they have acquired in an illegitimate manner? Only highly remunerated bank executives and millionaire taoisigh could believe that something like that was OK.