So 11 people who earned over €1 million in 2001 absolutely paid no income tax; welcome news indeed for those of us who live in the freefire zone of normal PAYE.
They were among 41 people earning over €500,000 who avoided paying income tax that year. Nine of them were PAYE earners who also managed to pay no tax, which I - like most PAYE imbeciles - did not know was technically possible.
Naturally, the lefties have denounced the existence of this community, which makes no financial contribution whatever to the State in which it lives, and for once I am inclined to agree with them. But then of course the Shinners weighed in. By this time, I should really be able to take their insolent hypocrisy with a plucky grin and a philosophic shrug of my tax-bearing shoulders, but alas, I can't.
Thus Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin TD, his finger quivering with indignation, can point to the lawful tax avoidance by hundreds of citizens of this Republic, declaring it to be "concrete evidence of the shameful legacy of Charlie McCreevy and Mary Harney". This is quite grotesque: after all, the Sinn Féin TD belongs to an extended organisation whose paramilitary arm systematically robs the State of tobacco and alcohol duties. His respect for the rule of law is such as to allow him be proudly photographed in jail with the cold-blooded killers of Det Garda Jerry McCabe. His friends in the IRA army council are about as acquainted with income tax as they are with Swahili irregular verbs - yet he feels free to lecture Government ministers on political morality. Marvellous: bloody marvellous.
Yet actually, who can blame the Shinners for the weird moral world that they inhabit? This is a world shaped and protected by the Department of the Taoiseach, the Department of Foreign Affairs, the Northern Ireland Office, 10 Downing street, MI5 and the rest of the peace processors. Sinn Féin-IRA's numerous criminal deeds never cause their politico-moral world to be troubled or disturbed by those in lawful authority. So the IRA's multi-million euro diesel-laundering scams, the cross-Border petrol-smuggling, the vast tobacco importation, the illicit white-spirit stills, and the cigarette thefts continue to cost the governments of Ireland and Britain millions of euro a year, but without public rebuke from either London or Dublin.
Indeed, such Sinn Féin humbug and IRA criminality are not merely tolerated, but are actually indulged, all to keep the Shinners in countenance. Meanwhile, their wretched war lost, these characters, with their back pockets stuffed with thick wads of used notes, their hands stained with the blood of thousands and calloused with all that midnight digging, now run their own commercial empires. Better still, they've been told by the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Dermot Ahern, that their future place in government in Dublin is assured. When has a government minister ever made such an abject and craven promise to any party in opposition, never mind one whose paramilitary wing was at that very time disposing of the tobacco from a multi-million pound warehouse robbery in Belfast? However, the Shinners are not alone in being immune to the ordinary laws of life. Some 242 people with declared incomes of between €100,000 and €1 million escaped paying any tax at all in 2001, using lawful tax loopholes. And what infuriates us poor PAYE dolts most about such tax avoidance measures is that we never get to hear of them - and with good reason.
The consolation that some innocents draw from the sorry, bottomless farce of the tribunals is that the State gets back much of the costs in taxation: not so. Those barristers gallantly plodding their laboured, ludicrously over-paid way through the various inquiries are able to protect much of their earnings from tax. For many - if not most - of the tax-shelter investment schemes of recent years have been launched in the Bar library where they are fully subscribed, thereby never seeing the light of a wigless day. So the rest of us never even get to hear of these mystery hospital car-parks that never open but which give their peruqued investors almost lifelong immunity to tax.
Over the past 15 years, many of the best minds in the Revenue Commissioners have hopped ship into tax consultancy firms. Patent laws prevent a comparable transfer of expertise between private companies: what you learn in Apple, you cannot then take to Microsoft. Yet the new Civil Service Bill prevents tax officials becoming tax consultants for only a mere year after they leave the public service. But on the other hand, since the Commissioners are in direct competition with accountancy firms, why do they not pay comparable salaries? The only way to get the best minds is by paying the best money: otherwise, gamekeepers turn poachers, even if they have to wait 12 months to do so.
But there is another, more fundamental point. Why are the taxes that we pay to the State a secret? What is the moral and political justification for this? Shouldn't the Revenue Commissioners as a matter of policy disclose both the declared incomes and the taxes paid for every resident of the State?
That way we'd know how much Bono is actually paying to the Government which he endlessly lectures about increasing its aid to the Third World. To be sure, he should have his tax-deductible allowances, such as his hair-dye, which no reasonable person would deny him, though we might urge him to attend to his roots a little more often. But how much tax does he pay out of the millions he earns every year? And why is this is not a matter of public record?