We reached a low point in Irish public life last Thursday, the day the Dail refused to include an investigation of the Ansbacher accounts among the terms of reference of the new tribunal. And worse than that, the arguments against doing so were so transparently bogus as to raise the question of whether the political establishment had now been corrupted, as well as a few individuals. The repeated mantra of government spokespeople was that the Revenue Commissioners could investigate adequately the Ansbacher accounts. That this could be asserted so defiantly in the face of the obvious reality - that this excuse is palpable nonsense - was depressing.
The Revenue Commissioners had failed even to find out about the existence of the Ansbacher accounts for over two decades (they also failed to notice that Charles Haughey's lifestyle could not possibly be supported by the known sources of his income). The Revenue Commissioners are themselves under a cloud and are the subject of an investigation under the terms of reference of the new tribunal.
The Revenue Commissioners have no powers to acquire documents that are outside the State and we know that most if not all the documents and data available in the State on the Ansbacher accounts have already been removed or destroyed. Any investigation by the Revenue Commissioners would be a private one: given the public disquiet over the information that has been revealed about the Ansbacher accounts, a private and secret investigation won't do.
A very senior minister in the present Government told me last week that the real reason the Ansbacher accounts are not the subject of a general investigation by the new tribunal is that this would result in a flight of hot money from the country, leading to an increase in interest rates.
I do not know whether this was just more palaver to explain the inexplicable or, more worryingly, whether the Minister was telling what he believed to be the truth. Assuming the latter, what it amounts to is that there is a small clique here who, if threatened with being subjected to the same law as the rest of us, will bring pressure to bear to stop that. The fact is that a group of people, aided and abetted by the late Des Traynor and others has been able to salt away vast sums of money through an ingenious piece of commercial trickery. This has involved the routeing of monies through a paper bank in the Cayman Islands back into an Irish bank, earning interest just fractionally (one eighth of 1 per cent) less than was and is available to normal depositors.
And it is inconceivable that not all of this money was either to evade tax or to evade some other form of scrutiny, or both. What possible legitimate commercial reason could there be for such a transaction?
And this was being done on a very considerable scale, at least £38 million-plus in 1989. The plus bit arises from the fact that in addition to the £38 million, there were stocks and shares also on deposit in these accounts.
It is not enough that only those accounts are investigated that had links with people who held public office. If some of the rich and the famous here are, or have been, involved in this chicanery, we should know about it and they deserve to be exposed, along with the professionals who aided and abetted them.
So why did the Government parties, supported by a few independents, refuse to include the Ansbacher accounts generally among the issues to be investigated by the new tribunal? Since the reasons that they offered for refusing are not remotely credible, one conclusion that can be drawn is that they (i.e. the Government parties) were yielding to threats. If this transpires to be the case, then that would constitute a worse scandal than anything the new tribunal would be enquiring inquiring into.
There was a time when one would have expected the Progressive Democrats not to tolerate such behaviour by a partner in government - remember the many lines in the sand drawn by Des O'Malley in the 1989-1992 period? The only one drawing lines in the sand nowadays is Ray Burke, and that is in relation to refusing to answer any of the myriad questions that now arise from what he told the Dail last Wednesday (see below).
What is Mary Harney in Government for if not to ensure that those issues that she, in opposition, regarded as fundamental are not glossed over? And what are we to make of her failure to insist that the clever and modest proposal of Pat Rabbitte in relation to the Ray Burke affair be accepted?
Rabbitte proposed that the new tribunal make a preliminary private investigation of the donation of £30,000 to Ray Burke during the 1989 general election campaign and that if it discovered there was no prima-facie evidence of wrongdoing it should so report and end further inquiries into the matter.
Before Ray Burke gave his version to the Dail of the background to the £30,000 donation, there was reason to be satisfied that he did nothing improper. Yes, the donation of £30,000 was extraordinary, but it seemed unlikely that he would draw attention to it if it were improper by handing over £10,000 of it to Fianna Fail.
But his explanation to the Dail raised some troubling questions. He was careful to avoid saying that he gave £10,000 of the £30,000 donation to Fianna Fail. He said again and again that he gave £10,000 from the funds that he had collected for his own election campaign. Thus, it seems, he was not calling attention to this particular donation.
Indeed the questions arise: where did Fianna Fail think this money came from, and to whom was a receipt issued for this money? Fianna Fail has claimed that all donors to the party are issued with receipts. Well, who got the receipt for the £10,000?
Another question that arises is how much money was donated to Burke during the course of this election campaign. He refused steadfastly to answer questions about this in the Dail, claiming that it would be "unprecedented" to do so. So, what if it is unprecedented?
And there is a further question: given the trauma that Ray Burke endured in the early 1970s, when he was the subject of a protracted Garda investigation into alleged irregularities in relation to planning decisions, would it not have been expected that he, of all people, would have wanted to avoid further queries on that score? Wouldn't he, of all people, have had alarm bells going off in his mind on being given £30,000 in cash in two brown paper packets?
And one further point about the terms of reference of the new tribunal. Why does the inquiry into Charles Haughey's affairs begin in 1979, when by then he had acquired the lifestyle that raised those questions about the sources of his income?