“The VHI should not be allowed to do this,” a member of the Cabinet said. “It is a form of bullying.”

“Politicians, developers in Nama and a few bankers are the only people who can afford health insurance,” the Minister said. “It is not fair to single us out for excessive charges.”

He insisted it was little comfort to him that he would be able to claim his health insurance on expenses. “There is a principle involved,” he said hilariously.

The scientists, all out-and-out bankers, have spent several years smashing economies together in a bid to establish the existence of Europe.

“Results so far seem to show a hint of something,” a scientist explained.

“It might be that Europe really exists or it could just be a figment of our imagination,” he added.

“Borrowers who fall into arrears are encouraged to contact their bank but are openly mocked when they do so,” a UN spokesman said.

“We believe that the lender should not laugh until the borrower has left the room,” he added.

However, a banker insisted that the issue was just a misunderstanding. “We’re not laughing at you. “We’re laughing at the absurd suggestion that we’re supposed to care about you,” he said.

“All the promising young gangsters are going into banking,’ a lifelong criminal said. “They used to look up to me, now they want to be CEOs.”

The criminal admitted that he too would go into banking if he had his time again.

“Drug dealing can’t compete with an industry that gives you millions of euro for being bad at what you do,” he said sadly.

“When we get caught we get punished,” he added.

“We can’t just place people anywhere,” a civil service source said. “Many of these luxury homes do not meet Social Housing Design Standards.”

Some of their swimming pools don’t even have shallow ends and several helicopter landing pads that we have seen at developers homes are not regulation size,” he added.

Meanwhile, Minister of State for Planning Ciarán Cuffe will today tell planners that NAMA is to establish a committee of architects and planners to decide what to do with the disastrous ghost estates  that they designed and approved.

“This is a real coup. No one knows more about ghost estates than planners and architects,” a source said. “It’d be like having Seanie Fitz working for NAMA.”

The impasse was broken early this morning when it was apparently agreed that witnesses giving evidence in public would be encouraged to use the “mental reservation” system made popular by the catholic church.

“Bankers, regulators and politicians are all cunning fellows,” a source said. “Once they know they can use mental reservation we don’t think any of them will inadvertently tell the truth.”

Mental reservation, more commonly known to the layman as lying, is a system whereby people state the harsh truth in their heads and bland platitudes out loud. Practitioners of mental reservation believe they lead their lives bathed in God’s light.

Vote for The Mire as Best Humour and Best Newcomer in the 2010 Irish Blog Awards.

“Most bankers don’t think they did anything wrong,” a spokesman said. “By changing the language of banking we believe bankers will come to accept that what they do is wrong and will ultimately stop doing it.”

“So, from January 11th bank customers will be referred to as ‘victims’ and all transactions will be known as ‘muggings’ or ‘violations’. This is a small step but we believe it is a step in the right direction,” he added.

“It is hoped at a later date to introduce a system whereby bank customers – or victims – will be able to make victim impact statements. If the banks do develop a moral compass there are also plans to change the language of the catholic church and the public sector unions.”

A leading banker told The Mire that the fundamentals of banking had changed so much recently that it was by no means clear that bank staff had jobs to do. “Let’s face it, we don’t lend money, any more and there aren’t too many people mad enough to deposit money with us,” he said. “We can’t give people pay increases for jobs that don’t exist.”

However, a trade union official, while acknowledging an essential truth about the current nature of banking, said the simple fact that people had offices to go to was enough to prove that they had jobs. “These people have jobs,” he said. “They might not have work but they do have jobs.”

He said that questioning fundamentals like what people do and whether it is needed is a “toxic proposal” that would mean descending below a “threshold of decency in the country”.

“It has reached the stage in public discourse in Mireland where the most preposterous proposals can be put forward and accepted as being legitimate and I reject that absolutely and completely,” he said.