Fraud must not be borne by public

With the publication last weekend of the Ansbacher Report, and the revelations it contained, there really wasn't too much left for the Dáil to do yesterday except utter a formal condemnation and fulminate against those who defrauded the country.

Yet, it was important that our parliament return from its summer recess to debate, in a special session, one of the most shameful episodes of tax evasion on a grand scale unearthed in this country.

Tánaiste Mary Harney, who established the enquiries that resulted in the report, went to the heart of the matter when she said that the whole affair had undermined the sovereignty of the very State itself.

She said the Ansbacher Report went to the heart of our democracy because a state that fails to collect its taxes is a failed state. This country, quite blatantly failed to collect taxes from people who could well afford to pay them, but instead chose to calculatingly evade their obligations.

Such evasion was facilitated, as the Tánaiste pointed out, by the systematic failings in regulatory bodies such as the Revenue Commissioners, the Central Bank, statutory auditors and their institutions as well as the Department of Trade and Enterprise.

For the taxpayers who have been shouldering their responsibility, it is not enough that those guilty of defrauding the state should be named and shamed. The full rigour of the law must be brought to bear heavily on those who were indifferent towards it.

The Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell, has dampened expectations that prosecutions will be consequent upon the findings of the Ansbacher Report. That is not good enough. Every legal possibility must be exhausted in the pursuit of those who are deemed guilty because the common good demands that they be brought to justice.

In his contribution to the debate, the Minister for Finance, Charlie McCreevy, endeavoured to mitigate the responsibility of the Central Bank in failing to detect the irregularities that had taken place. The Central Bank cannot just shrug off its failure but, at this juncture, recriminations are futile.

Hard lessons, hopefully, have been learned and stringent regulatory structures must be put in place to try to ensure that nothing on such a magnitude can ever happen again.

The cost of the Ansbacher enquiries amounts to 3.2 million, a cost which should not have to be borne by the taxpayer.

In this regard, Phil Hogan, Fine Gael’s spokesman on Public Enterprise, suggested that CRH and the Guinness and Mahon bank bear the liability for it. Both have been intrinsically linked to the Ansbacher scandal and have a moral duty to make some restitution.

Both could well afford to bear the cost of the report. CRH, several of whose directors were implicated, and its subsidiaries have been on a heavy acquisition trail in the US, having added ten new businesses or investments to the materials division at a cost of 242.2 million.

This is a disgraceful chapter in our history which is far from closed.