What a bloody awful State we're in. The chief executive officer of the biggest bank in the country, Tom Mulcahy of AIB, announces that up to 1991, bogus non-resident accounts were "an industry issue".
In plain language, all of the banks in this State were helping their well-heeled customers to dodge taxes, cheat the community and add to the burden of people who pay their way.
Worse, they were helping to deprive people who couldn't pay their way of services that they and their families needed.
One of these, a young drug addict, appeared before Mr Justice O'Flaherty in the Court of Criminal Appeal on Monday. He reduced her sentence for stealing a handbag from nine years' imprisonment to six.
Another, a sick and troubled boy who suffers from a form of high-functioning autism, was sent to a remand centre - because, as Mr Justice Kelly explained in the High Court, there was no suitable place for him.
Their cases illustrate the consequences of gross inequality, even as Jim Mitchell, Pat Rabbitte and colleagues of all parties in the Committee of Public Accounts explore some of its causes.
AIB and the Revenue Commissioners disagree as to what arrangement, if any, was made to write off taxes owed on bogus non-resident accounts.
It follows they don't agree as to what the arrangement, if any, should be called; how much tax it covered and for how many accounts. The bank doesn't even seem to know who was in a position to say.
This extraordinary state of affairs calls for the most thorough investigation by the most experienced investigator. The Comptroller and Auditor General has been suggested.
If he is given the task, he should also be equipped with whatever powers and resources are needed to complete it.
Because, yet again, the central question raised here is: Who runs the country and in whose interest? It's about how our democracy works.
It seems as if the banks and their would-be regulators in the Central Bank and the Revenue Commissioners have a cosy relationship. If they do, we know from bitter experience who'll pay for it.
We will. We always do.
We're still paying for a cosy relationship between Fianna Fail leaders and the beef industry. Some paid on the double, in taxes and levies, for AIB's crass venture into insurance.
And we pay in the quality of our society, which is dangerously lop-sided; run for the benefit of the most threatening and aggressive, often at their dictation.
But some politicians, on whom we depend to defend the public interest, fail to take their responsibilities seriously; and the regulators seem unsure of their ground.
Politics itself is under at tack. As Proinsias De Rossa writes in the current issue of Times Change, it is "criticised, regularly and insidiously, by people intolerant of anyone who might inhibit their personal interests or insist on wider responsibilities to local or national communities".
(It doesn't seem to have struck these macho critics that it's to the State they, too, invariably turn when they run into trouble.)
But as the Public Accounts Committee poked this week through the thicket of secrecy that surrounds money matters, the Government's response was uncertain.
Martin Cullen, Seamus Brennan and others shifted uncomfortably, made a few populist noises - and waffled. There was the Constitution to think of. And the market.
While the committee was trying to come to grips with Mr Mulcahy's exquisitely evasive guff, where was the Minister for Finance?
He was exchanging chit-chat on Today FM about offshore betting, making his usual point about what a lad he is.
We know what a lad he is: the one who thought the financial crises in the Far East weren't going to make much difference here, who dismissed the NIB affair as of little consequence.
Now he says he has no intention of discussing AIB with the chairman of the Revenue Commissioners - though, as Michael Noonan insists, public policy issues are at stake.
Naturally, he was not among the commentators and politicians who were struck last week by the revelation of one law for the rich and another for the poor.
So he may not have noticed that, no sooner had the idea been suggested than Mr Justice O'Flaherty of the Supreme Court stepped up to prove it.
He was delivering judgment on an appeal by Sabrina Walsh (20), of Coultry Road, Dublin, who had been sentenced to nine years' imprisonment by the Central Criminal Court.
Her counsel said she didn't know that the value of the contents of the tourist's handbag she'd taken from a fashionable restaurant in Dawson street was £10,000. She had pleaded guilty; she had six previous convictions.
Now, some sneaking regarders had supported Mr Mulcahy's plea in mitigation of AIB's activities, when he implied that because all of the banks were helping customers to set up bogus non-resident accounts, it wasn't too bad.
It was clear, of course, that those who made the excuse had never tried it in a shoplifting case in the district courts. Judge O'Flaherty was sitting in the Court of Criminal Appeal, but he proved the point.
Bag-snatching, he said, according to the report in this newspaper, was like a cancer in society and had to be stamped out. The court was sending the word out, loud and clear, that people involved in handbag-snatching would get exemplary sentences from now on.
Handbag-snatching, he continued, created infinite disruption and victims would have to be protected. When a handbag was snatched, people lost their money, house keys, car keys and credit cards.
I wonder if anyone has given much thought to the disruption and inconvenience caused by tax-evasion and those who connive in it.
I don't suppose they have. Besides, you'd hardly expect the authorities, legal or political, to think of tax-evasion as the judge thinks of stealing handbags.
Of course not. They're different offences, committed by different classes, for different reasons.
And the distress suffered by someone who loses a handbag is not to be compared with that of a patient waiting for a hospital bed or a child for whom there's no place but a remand centre.
The Public Accounts Committee may help to express some of the anger the latest scandal has provoked. (I suppose if its subject were sex, we'd see more of it on television.)
The committee may even help to answer a question being asked more insistently these days: what the hell is going on here?
Just now it looks as if the only thing that prevents this State from qualifying as a banana republic is that we don't grow bananas.