By far the greatest theft in Irish history since the Plantation has occurred over the last 30 years and has involved the larceny of more than €1 billion.
There is apparently no willingness to view this as a crime that requires investigation by the law enforcement authorities, no willingness to investigate whether anybody may have aided or abetted those involved or may have attempted to assist them evade prosecution.
Before I go any further, let me make it clear I am not insinuating that anybody identified by the Travers report was personally guilty of criminality either by way of theft or by way of assisting those guilty to evade prosecution. I am simply stating what should be obvious: a mega crime was committed and there is not even talk about anybody being investigated by the authorities, let alone prosecuted.
The venerable Larceny Act of 1916 is the relevant law on all of this. Section 1 of the Act states: "A person steals who, without the consent of the owner, fraudulently and without a claim of right made in good faith, takes or carries away anything capable of being stolen with intent, at the time of such taking, permanently to deprive the owner thereof."
The welfare entitlements of old and mentally ill people are certainly objects capable of being stolen. Some of the people who took away these entitlements certainly intended to deprive these people permanently of the entitlements.
There was no consent to this removal of welfare entitlements, so we are left with the "fraudulently" and "without a claim of right made in good faith" as the outstanding elements. What is known as the mental element in the crime. What this means in effect is that the person who takes away the property of another must believe that he/she has no lawful authority to do that.
There was a case in 1979 at the Court of Criminal Appeal which illustrated the point, DPP v O'Loughlin. O'Loughlin, a farmer, took a muck-spreader from his neighbour's yard, believing (wrongly) that he was entitled to take away the muck-spreader since the neighbour owed him money. In a judgment delivered by no less an authority than the former Fine Gael presidential candidate and the then (in 1979) chief justice, Tom O'Higgins, it was found that this was a valid defence to the charge of larceny.
If the jury found O'Loughlin believed he was entitled to take the muck-spreader, the jury should be advised not to convict him of stealing the muck- spreader for O'Loughlin, in good faith, thought he had a claim of right on the muck- spreader.
However this principle does not seem to come to the relief of all of those who took away the welfare entitlements of the old people.
Some of them must have known full well they had no such right, they were not acting in good faith. They may have been acting on what they saw was the national interest and, no doubt they were, but some of them did not, in good faith, think they had a legal entitlement to take the money for it had been made clear to them that this was unlawful.
So, we know a crime has been committed, a crime involving the larceny of more than €1 billion from old people and mentally ill people. Mary Harney knew in early December that hundreds of millions of euros had been stolen from these vulnerable people.
Instead of reporting this to An Garda Síochána, she introduced a Bill in the Oireachtas whose effect would have been retrospectively to legalise the seizure of pensioners' money - this was the Bill that the Supreme Court found to be unconstitutional.
My question is this: How is there such a hullabaloo over the theft of €38 million from the Northern Bank in Belfast and no hullabaloo over the theft of €1 billion plus from old people? Why should there be demands for the prosecution, conviction and imprisonment of those who carried out the Northern Bank robbery and for those who aided and abetted them and no demand that those who carried out the far greater robbery be prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned and likewise anybody who may have assisted them evade prosecution.
Before the lawyers lose the run of themselves, I am not saying that this is what Mary Harney was attempting to do in introducing her unconstitutional Bill, I am merely pointing out that this would have been a side-effect of it.
But the thought of Mary Harney joining Ray Burke in the clink is a delicious one, isn't it? Perhaps not to poor Ray Burke though.