At a glance, they have little in common apart from a shared Christian name. One is a countryman of simple needs whose extravagance stretches to a game of poker with the neighbours at the kitchen table. Another is suave, urbane and so sharp-suited you could cut bread with his double cuffs. The third likes to portray himself as the quintessential rags-to-riches, work hard/play hard macho man.

Now, look again.

What you see is the story of modern Ireland. Seán Quinn, Seán FitzPatrick and Seán Dunne are an unholy trinity of the forces that landed us where we are, thrashing for survival as the country gets sucked down the plug hole. This time last year, they were universally celebrated for their testosterone-driven, risk-taking wealth. Now they are popularly regarded as villains of the recession. Between them they represent the pernicious stranglehold on the nation resulting from unregulated banking practices, reckless lending to builders and the cosy nepotism of Ireland's corporate firmament.

One is the richest man in the country. Another ran a miracle bank of the Celtic Tiger. The third treated the capital city as his €400m playhouse. The banking activities of two of them are being investigated by regulatory authorities. The third has taken up unofficial residency in the Four Courts, participating in several sets of proceedings at once.

The Insurer Seán Quinn By Michael Clifford

After the accident, John Deegan was dragged from the car into a waterlogged field. The others thought the car was going to go on fire. Deegan, who had been a passenger, was left in the field as they went for help. By then, he had already been rendered paraplegic as a result of the crash. He was destined to be confined to a wheelchair for the remainder of his life, requiring full-time care to function in the most basic manner.

Seven years after the accident in the Dublin suburb of Ballymun, Deegan found himself in the High Court, accused of fraud. There was no evidence he had committed any fraud, but the insurance company, which was obliged to compensate him for his severe injuries, was refusing to pay out. Quinn Direct claimed Deegan sustained his injuries in a fall from a third-storey balcony.

Soon after the case opened two weeks ago, Judge John Quirke expressed concern about the fraud claim, saying there didn't appear to be any evidence for it. The claim was withdrawn and a settlement of €1.75m reached. The 45-year-old paraplegic was finally relieved of the stress and threat that accompanied being dragged to court on a baseless charge.

In the same week that Deegan received his compensation, the principal of Quinn Direct was declaring himself a victim. "We feel the media frenzy around the Quinn Group is totally outlandish, outrageous… We have no idea why this agenda is to get Quinn," Seán Quinn told RTé News in a major public-relations exercise.

Powerful businessmen rushing to declare themselves victims in the global meltdown are becoming as common as a gloomy George Lee prognosis. Quinn is an unlikely victim.

The spotlight is currently trained on him because of his involvement in Anglo Irish Bank. He purchased 25% of the bank last year, and subsequently offloaded 10%. He lost a fortune, upwards of €1.5bn. He likes to portray this as a gamble that went sour.

However, the regulatory authorities are investigating how he offloaded his shares. Already, Quinn personally and his company have been hit with record fines over his behaviour in purchasing the shares. He stepped down as chairman of Quinn Direct as a result of the finding. The current investigation by the regulator is of a more serious nature. Yet Quinn sees himself as a victim, rather than a powerful player in the bonfire of the vanities that raged in Anglo Irish. "We were not involved in anything, no impropriety at all," he told RTé's Tommie Gorman.

Quinn is one of the outstanding entrepreneurs of his generation. He started in sand and gravel in his native Fermanagh 40 years ago. He expanded by specialising in areas previously the preserve of monopolies, like cement and glass. By the end of 2007, his fortune was estimated at €4.5bn.

The major cash cow of his group over the last eight years has been the insurance arm, Quinn Direct. Since 2002, the insurance business was strong enough to gift €570m to other arms of the group as Quinn extended his empire to Russia and India.

Quinn Direct had a shaky start in 1996, but by 2002, it had been turned around. Its owner shook up the industry. One innovation was directed at cutting down on legal fees, the bugbear of the industry. Quinn saw that the vital component in costs was the gaping window between an accident and final settlement. So he closed the window by installing a system in which claims were settled quickly, thus cutting out the potential for lawyers to balloon costs. He also began hiring ex-gardaí as claims managers.

Some elements of the policy are controversial. Last year the Sunday Tribune ran a story about a Polish man, Piotr Macewicz, who had been injured in an accident on an Irish building site. He now has difficulty walking, despite painful, complicated surgery. Macewicz had poor English. He agreed to accept a settlement for €10,000 from Quinn Direct, offered by an ex-garda claims manager soon after the accident. His solicitor claims he was entitled to around €150,000 and he hadn't a clue what he had signed up for. Quinn Direct denies anything improper was involved in the settlement. In his interview, Quinn referred to his insurance cash cow as being a victim of the media. "We settle 99.9% of claims without any dispute or hassle. Where we detect some type of fraud we challenge that and in 99% [of instances] we succeed. Only the 1% that we don't gets media headlines."

In reality, the headlines are generated by court appearances following a pattern in which Quinn Direct rather than the claimant appears to be trying it on. The company goes to court disputing a claim and after a few days, when it becomes apparent that Quinn Direct has no case, a settlement is made. That was the case with the invalided Deegan two weeks ago.

As it was with the biggest insurance claim in the history of the state by a Galway-based company, Murray Timbers, last year, which was seeking €54m. In that case, High Court judge Peter Kelly said he found the behaviour of the insurer "disturbing". At one stage he had threatened to hold a Quinn Direct manager in contempt and send papers to the DPP.

The comments echoed with those of an English High Court judge dealing with another arm of the Quinn empire some years ago. He had found the company had acted in a "cynical, calculated and unscrupulous" fashion in a dispute.

It is against this background that Quinn projects himself as the honest countryman who never compromises his business acumen by acting improperly. He eschews the ostentatious strutting of some of his contemporaries. The modesty of his lifestyle is something of which he is proud, and he deploys it to emphasise his integrity. "I just live a simple life with my wife and five kids," he told RTé. "Me, my family or my companies were never involved in impropriety in my lifetime in business."

The financial regulator has begged to differ. Last year, he fined Quinn, personally, €200,000 and the insurance company €3.2m following an investigation that found Quinn had taken a loan from the company to buy Anglo Irish shares. The loan had depleted the reserves of Quinn Direct below the required threshold for an insurance company. Quinn also stepped down as chairman.

The fine was a multiple of the largest ever previously handed down by the regulator. Quinn told Tommie Gorman that while he accepts the finding, he doesn't believe there was anything improper in what he did. The regulator, who has been roundly criticised for being too lenient on the financial-services industry, obviously believed there was something highly improper in what was done.

That issue pales in comparison with the seriousness of the matter currently under investigation. When Quinn offloaded his 10% last year, a number of elite businessmen were given loans by Anglo Irish to buy the shares. The deal was done privately, in order to protect the bank's share price.

The authorities must now decide on what exactly happened, who was involved and whether the deal constituted illegally supporting the share price. Quinn is adamant he did nothing wrong. "There is no impropriety in what we did in that bank or any bank… absolutely none," he said. The investigation will determine whether such a statement is valid or not.

Either way, the deal involved rich men playing their games behind closed doors, far from the eyes of the thousands of small investors who thought they had invested in a transparent, public company.

Now, Quinn owes us, the citizens, a huge amount of money through our newly acquired bank. He has not revealed the extent of his debt.

This is the matter that has thrust Quinn into the media spotlight. As his empire is in private hands, it is not subject to the scrutiny that similar-sized public companies are. The only insight normally provided into Quinn's dealings are through the courts, and the results there don't sit well with the image of a man who never tires of saying that his word is his bond.

His interview with RTé, ostensibly designed to deal with Quinn's role in Anglo Irish, was peppered with references to his family. At the conclusion, Gorman stood outside the Derrylin office and related that Quinn was at that very moment attending a major family event in Dublin. The nugget provided a cuddly tail to a rare interview with the hard-nosed tycoon. At least the man from RTé wasn't out to "get" him.

How the Mighty Have Fallen

Personal Wealth in 2008: €4.5bn (source: Sunday Times Rich List)

Present personal wealth: difficult to estimate precisely, but he
is believed to have lost
about €1.5bn through
his involvement with
Anglo Irish Bank

The Developer Seán Dunne By Justine McCarthy

Speculation about Seán Dunne's solvency has gazumped obscene property prices as the hottest topic of conversation for the chattering classes. The former future Baron of Ballsbridge is a man some people love to hate, but even his most bitter critics profess some sympathy for him as his travails mount and mount and mount.

In the last week of January alone, he was forced to pay somewhere around €1m for the D4 Hotels website he claimed he owned, his former property agents secured a hearing date in their law suit against him for €1.5m in unpaid fees, the owner of a professional cleaning service began High Court proceedings against him for trespass on her phone, and An Bord Pleanála rejected his entire planning application for his Ballsbridge site, knocking about €300m off its potential value. Word had it too that the silver-haired 53-year-old was suffering from a head cold. Most men would cave in under such pressure, so one must assume that the Dunner really does have steel in a certain part of his body.

There are those, though, who swear it's in his heart.

"Seán Dunne, as an individual is 100% solvent," he told Newstalk's Eamon Keane last Monday. But, he added, "There are not many companies in Ireland today that are probably solvent and that's just a reality of life." Such equivocation is certain to unsteady the nerves of any adversaries queuing up in the Four Courts for expensive legal tangles with a man whose proclivity for litigation has kept serried ranks of the Law Library in pinstripes for the last decade or more. He granted tacit permission for public discussion about his financial worth last month when he told the New York Times: ". . . if the banking crisis continues, I could be considered insolvent."

He has variously blamed jealousy, begrudgery and snobbishness for his woes. "It's part of the Irish psyche and it is the result of 800 years of being controlled by other people, of watching everything the master or landlord is doing," he has pronounced, without a hint of irony. To many who have observed his ostentatious displays of consumerism during the boom, the Dunner personified the "Irish RM" style shoneenism of the newly enriched and empowered. Yet, his brief stint in a High Court witness box when he sued Kenmare hotelier John Brennan in January revealed a man who, despite his reputation for favouring Armani suits, retained his native accent, pronouncing "Saturday" as "Saturda" and his trophy hotel, the Berkeley Court as "the Berk-ly Court".

His €1.5m wedding party in 2004 on Aristotle Onassis's yacht in the Italian Med was interrupted to take phone calls of congratulations from the then Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, and his minister for finance, Charlie McCreevy, whose gated mansion in Sallins was built by the Dunner. Among the guests on board the 44-bed boat were people normally described in the social columns as the movers-and-shakers, including Irish Nationwide boss Michael Fingleton.

His marriage to a gossip columnist, Gayle Killilea, was his second; the first, to Jennifer Coyle – sister of Largo Foods founder, Raymond Coyle – ended in a costly divorce.

Despite growing up in a county council house in Tullow which, he told the New York Times, had no running water, the Baron quickly made friends with the most influential people in Ireland when he set up his business in the capital.

Bertie Ahern, while Taoiseach, was a private guest at his Shrewsbury Road home on a number of occasions and returned the compliment, controversially, by inviting the property developer (with no known history of involvement in the Anglo-Irish peace process) to attend his celebrated address in Westminster marking the two nations' newfound cordiality. Last summer, as Ahern's protracted goodbye reached a climax with his address to the joint houses on Capitol Hill, the Dunner was again prominent in the audience, as was his wife.

In his Newstalk interview last Monday, he repeated that he is not a member of Fianna Fáil. He made a similar denial to Marian Finucane on Radio One last year, insisting: "I didn't write or ever dictate Fianna Fáil policy. I mean I tried hard enough over a couple of pints to get Bertie to change stamp duty and everyone knows stamp duty wasn't even considered."

Like his construction cohorts (such as frequent development partner Seán Mulryan), the Baron was a regular in the Fianna Fáil tent at the Galway Races, the totemic annual knees-up organised by the party's Midas, Des Richardson, even after he quit his job as the party's chief fund-raiser. Richardson, who acquired a property in Sandymount, Dublin 4 from Dunne, was a hi-vis supporter of his blighted dream to turn Ballsbridge into Knightsbridge.

There is a good side to Dunne's character too. In his old school run by the Patrician Brothers in Tullow, the Seán Dunne award is presented to an outstanding pupil each year. In recent years, he has participated in building houses for poor people in South Africa under the mantle of the Niall Mellon Trust (a trip also made by Seán FitzPatrick in the past) though, according to a source who was on the last building blitz, Dunne was reluctant to forego his comforts.

He is no stranger to South Africa, having built a five-star hotel resort, the Lagoon Beach, in Cape Town.

You don't have to be a mathematical genius to guess the depth of the financial hole he now finds himself in. His property-buying spree in Ballsbridge – snapping up the Berkeley Court, Jury's and Jury's Towers hotels, a portion of AIB Bank Centre, Hume House and various residences on Shrewsbury Road – totted up to around three-quarters of a billion euro. He is the money-bags rumoured to have paid the highest price for a private house in Ireland during the Celtic Tiger when Walford sold on Shrewsbury Road for €58m in 2005. He owns other lands in County Kildare, Wicklow and Dublin (including Donnybrook Mall, a site on Dublin's south quays and apartments in the capital) and has disposed of lands at Woodtown Manor after being refused planning permission for a nursing home. In Greystones, where Dunne's share of another venture with Ballymore's Seán Mulryan is estimated to be worth around €70m, his plans have again been beset with planning difficulties.

Considering his borrowings and the collapse in property values, with development land virtually unsellable, it will be cold comfort to Dunne that he was never one to play the stock market. It will be colder comfort still to his fellow countrymen and women that the dashing of his grandiose plans for a 37-storey diamond-shaped tower will have a knock-on effect on the national economy. There is, after all, no other conclusion you can reach on a re-reading of his appeal submission to An Bord Pleanála, in which he warned of catastrophic repercussions and that foreign investment would "dry up". He wrote: ". . .the city is facing an office accommodation crisis and, if firms cannot find space in the city centre, competing cities in Europe and the rest of the world will be looked to… the decision on planning permission has implications for the national economy as a whole."

How big a price the Baron will have to pay for his fellow citizens' jealousy, begrudgery and snobbishness has yet to be definitively assessed.

How the MIghty Have Fallen

Personal Wealth in 2008: Impossible to hazard a guess safely without information on borrowings and other liabilities, but here are some examples of his assets: 60 acres in Celbridge, €60m; €65m land share in Greystones; Walford, Shrewsbury Road, €58m; Montbrook HQ, Merrion Square, €25m; Berkley Court/Jury's site, €139m. Total: €347m.

Estimated worth of those assets now: 60 acres in Celbridge €24m; land share in Greystones €20m; Walford, Shrewsbury Road €13m; Mountbrook HQ, Merrion Square €4.5m; Berkeley Court/Jury's site €90m. Total: €151m

The Banker Seán Fitzpatrcik By Justine McCarthy

It must be a comfort to Seán FitzPatrick that his home is a salubrious period house in Greystones, as he can expect to be spending much of his time inside it, ducking the masses' opprobrium. "Irish stand united in hatred of banker Seán FitzPatrick" ran a headline in USA Today on 28 January, tidily synopsising how the fortunes of the erstwhile lionised banker have been pulverised.

FitzPatrick is the voodoo figure of the recession. Six months ago he was being worshipped as the epitome of the jetset-tanned, sharp-suited, iconoclastic meritocracy. Now distraught Anglo Irish Bank shareholders, the newly unemployed and pension-levied public servants are furious that his swaggering, high-risk machismo has rebounded on everybody. Nationalisation of his bank is costing the average family €20,000, not to mention taxpayers' €400m-plus exposure from the bank-guarantee scheme motivated by the threat of Anglo's imminent extinction last September.

People's ire was not ameliorated when FitzPatrick told Marian Finucane on RTé radio that, the night the scheme was hatched in Merrion Street, he had gone out to dinner, returned home at half-past nine, watched some tv and slept soundly until morning. He said he could not say sorry to the people with any sincerity because the whole fandango was not his fault; the cause was global. Nor was the national spleen pacified when he subsequently used a speech to a local society in Greystones to urge the minister for finance to kill off the "sacred cows" of child benefit and universal pensions in the budget, while granting a generous reduction in company taxes.

"Reaction to a wealthy banker, fresh from tapping the public purse, telling the government to tighten the belts of its weakest citizens was predictably hostile," observed USA Today. As if to prove beyond doubt that he was devoid of a sensitivity gene, he insisted: "Of course banks have made mistakes and Anglo Irish Bank has made mistakes because we're in the business of risk... But have we been reckless? No, we haven't. We cover all our loans in a belt and braces way," he told Finucane. At that stage, we were still ignorant of his years of corporate deception, hiding loans of up to €129m from the authorities by temporarily stashing them in Michael Fingleton's Irish Nationwide.

If ever there was a boy destined to embody a nation's boom-to-bust epic it was twinkly-eyed Seánie (as his fan, Bertie Ahern, calls him); born 21 June, 1948, to Shankill, Co Dublin, dairy farmer Michael FitzPatrick and civil servant Johanna Maher. He majored in rugby at Presentation College, Bray, where he captained the junior and senior teams. Academically, though, he was nearer the bottom of the class, scoring one paltry honour in his leaving cert and scraping into UCD to study commerce on the back of five matric passes.

In an interview with business management guru Dr Ivor Kenny in January 2001, FitzPatrick said he chose to become an accountant because "I had decided I was going to get a job that would pay me good money".

Competitiveness was in his blood, he disclosed. As a teenager, he would come home and announce he had come second in some race or other, to which his mother would respond: "Who came first?"

After apprenticing with an antecedent company of Ernst & Young, he joined PricewaterhouseCoopers. A fellow novice in the office was Charlie McCreevy, who has been widely accused of contributing to the recession by pursuing a "light hand" policy on banking when he was minister for finance. Both men left the firm at around the same time. "I didn't see him again for about 10 years, just as he was achieving notoriety challenging Charlie Haughey," he told Ivor Kenny.

At 26, FitzPatrick joined Irish Bank of Commerce on a salary of £7,200. On day one in the job, he phoned his mother and said: "I've got this huge office and two newspapers and I've got a carpet with such a deep pile you can't hear anything." His first purchase was his home in Greystones for £6,800. That was the year he married Caitriona O'Toole, a former secretary. They have three adult children.

Two features distinguished the rising banker's career. One was his emphasis on building team spirit, which he attributed to his experiences on the rugby fields. The other was sheer brass neck. When his bank was taken over in the 1970s and his boss assigned him to draw up a list of potential chief executives of Anglo Irish, FitzPatrick, by then the financial controller, proposed himself for the job. Once in situ, he further proposed that he join the board of the parent company. Soon after, his name was added to the list of directors. By 1986, he was chief executive of the merged Anglo Irish and City of Dublin banks with a market capitalisation of just over €1m.

The strategy from the start was to focus on the commercial sector, particularly builders, developers and property speculators. An avowed critic of "bright people" and Irish Management Institute clubbable types, he chased some of Ireland's richest men to grace his client list. While he eulogised personal integrity in his interview with Ivor Kenny, one story he told betrayed the sort of ambivalence about ethics which would prove his downfall.

"After the beef tribunal report came out, our board felt they should do no more business with the Goodman Group," he recalled. "I remember looking Larry Goodman in the eye and could see that he was saying inside, 'How can they do this to me?' Anyway, we withdrew and, to my eternal shame, we were wrong... But we'll never let something like that happen again."

Meanwhile, he was feathering his own nest, using undisclosed loans for property investments, film-finance deals, private equity and to buy some of Anglo's shares. Just as his move from chief executive into the chairman's seat, while frowned on by some of the corporate establishment, was not illegal, neither was there a law specifically banning the concealment of his shares in fellow bank, Irish Nationwide.

However, his successor as chairman, Donal O'Connor, apologised to shareholders at a meeting in the Mansion House after FtizPatrick's resignation on 18 December, damning the surreptitious share movements as "wrong and unacceptable". O'Connor is a former director of the Dublin Docklands Development Authority where FitzPatrick also sat on the board while Lar Bradshaw, who resigned from Anglo Irish Bank at the same time as him in December, was chairman of the state-owned company rich with development land. Yet again, it was found that no laws had been broken when the DDDA entered into a consortium with the country's foremost builder, Bernard McNamara, to build a new town at the old Irish Glass Bottle site in Dublin's Poolbeg. Belatedly, an Oireachtas committee has decided that the cosy arrangement of Anglo Irish Bank financing a project where two of its own directors were prominent players bears a second look. By the time of his humiliation two months ago, the previously anti-establishment Seán FitzPatrick had risen to the top of Ireland's corporate royalty. He was Mr Establishment, sitting on the boards of Aer Lingus, Smurfit Kappa, Greencore and Experian and due to become head honcho at the Institute of Chartered Accountants this year.

When he retired as chief executive of Anglo Irish Bank after 18 years (his combined salary and bonuses hitting €2.8m for his last full year), he took over as chairman, a switch considered contrary to best practice. In 2006, his chairman's salary was €320,000, boosted by €533,000 in bonus payments. In that same year, a quarter of all Irish working men were employed in construction and home-buyers armed with crazy mortgage approvals formed long queues outside new developments to buy into the property euphoria driven by tax breaks for speculators. In the 2006 census, nearly one in every six dwellings in the country was lying vacant.

But there was no stopping Anglo Irish, the builders' bank, and the ultimate nexus of corporate avarice. Confined to his lovely home these days, Seán FitzPatrick has plenty of time to rue his pronouncement some years ago that, "I don't give a damn about money – now that I've got some."

How the Mighty Have Fallen

Personal Wealth in 2008: €55m (source: Sunday Times Rich List)

Present personal wealth: A small fraction of that following the virtual wipe-out of his Anglo Irish Bank shareholding (valued at €39m in 2007), fee income from other relinquished directorships and the property slump.