Trump: hustler or genius?

My parents had, within them, the Irish DNA of a fear of poverty, passed on through the generations, brought about by the famines in the 1800s in which hundreds of thousands died or emigrated.

- Brendan Seery

They were very careful with what money they had and had an inherent distrust of the wealthy.

As my mother would say — can a rich man be honest and can an honest man be rich? They believed in the simple ways: Work hard and save your money by putting it in a bank. No gambling — other than the odd "flutter" on the "gee gees"… and certainly no playing the stock market.

Stockbrokers, whether my mother actually encountered any of them or not, were regarded as "smarmy" and not to be trusted.

Nevertheless, my father did own 300 shares of the then Rhodesian Breweries. Nothing else. He never sold them and I think that they neither went up nor down.

Against that background, I remember being terrified by the grainy black-and-white films of the Great Depression which hit the US in 1929 with the Wall Street Crash and then rippled out across the world.