"There are no untouchables," said Mr Justice Smyth in the High Court on Monday when adjudicating on Liam Lawlor. The newspapers yesterday joined the chorus. "Day of untouchables heads into twilight" claimed The Irish Times; "Days of the untouchables well and truly numbered" proclaimed the Irish Independent; "No untouchables as Lawlor jailed" was the banner heading on the front page of the Examiner.
The judge may be stating a proposition in law, which, as a proposition, is fine. But where were the newspapers coming from? Does anyone really believe the sacred asylum that protects the well-heeled is breached by what happened on Monday? Just look around.
Eighteen months ago the Comptroller and Auditor General revealed that all the major financial institutions, including some State-owned financial institutions, engaged in concerted tax fraud. The fraud exposed was not just in respect of DIRT but, manifestly, was of a far broader nature for the monies deposited in the DIRT accounts were, in the main, monies being hidden from income tax. The extent of the fraud was probably in the region of hundreds of millions of pounds (taking the DIRT tax plus the lost income tax). The banks took a full and knowing part in this fraud and were therefore guilty of fraud.
The penalty for this, so far at least, has been a slap on the hand, a minor penalty charge on the main financial institution involved, AIB. Nobody in AIB has been brought before the courts, nobody will spend a day in jail. So what is this about the day of the untouchables heading into the twilight?
The Revenue Commissioners knew in 1991 there had been a major tax fraud in AIB in relation to DIRT. Nothing was done about it for eight years and action was taken only after there had been media comment. How could it be that the Revenue Commissioners could not be bothered about a mega-fraud, which, they knew, if pursued, would yield them at least some tens of millions of pounds? How is it there has been no inquiry into what was going on? The answer is that the Revenue Commissioners are also in the untouchable bracket. Nothing was done and nothing will be done.
We know from several of the inquiries in the last decade that well-known accountancy firms broke the law in helping clients to cook their books. The reason nothing was done about them was/is because the days of the untouchables are not numbered.
"Take another glaring case. One of the few findings of the beef tribunal report was: There was a deliberate policy in the Goodman Group of companies to evade payments of income tax by way of under-the-counter payments to employees. The making of such payments was concealed in the records of the company by recording fictitious payments to hauliers and farmers . . . The records of the company were misleading and calculated to deceive the Revenue authorities in the event of an investigation and did so deceive them . . . The system of concealment was common in all relevant plants, was known to the top management of the group, undoubtedly authorised by them."
The amount of money involved was several million pounds and what was done about it? Nothing. Not even the mildest sanction was invoked against any member of the top management of the Goodman group.
Mary Harney has been huffing and puffing for years about scandals in corporate Ireland, through the use of Ansbacher accounts and other scams. But what has happened to the corporate types involved? Nothing.
In India the untouchables are a low-caste Hindu group, whose occupations and habits are deemed by the rest of Hindu society as polluting. In Ireland the untouchables are a high-caste group. They include not just bankers, accountants, tax fraudsters and some higher civil servants but a range of others, all of whom remain outside the ambit of the law and of accountability.
Among the Irish untouchables are Fine Gael and the Progressive Democrats. It is not regarded as refined in polite society to wonder from where Fine Gael got loads of money on its return to office in 1995. Neither is it polite to inquire where the Progressive Democrats got its loot especially in its early years.
For decades, India has been trying to rid itself of its untouchable caste. It will take millennia here. Yesterday's headlines, alas, are premature.
Postscript: In this column last week I referred irreverently to the prayer Our Father (aside from the lines "Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them who trespass against us") as a piece of pious gobbledegook. I apologise for this disrespectful characterisation of a prayer, which so many people regard as sacred, primarily because the gospels of Luke and Matthew say Jesus composed it.
In fact, that characterisation wrongly conveys my attitude to the prayer. My misgivings about it have to do primarily with the line "Thy Will be done on earth as it is in heaven" which partly has been the impetus for appalling crimes ("God wills it" was the battle cry of the Crusades which caused the massacre of tens of thousands of innocent people.)
I also wonder about the line "And lead us not into temptation" - what kind of God might do that, when, according to the Bible, temptation could be the pathway to hell?