The shrill adolescent voices of the 60s that proclaimed the system was corrupt, that they were all at it, that the State was a conspiracy by the rich against the poor - they were right after all.
Solicitors, accountants, bankers and business people, many of the great names of wealthy Ireland of the last several decades, were engaged in an elaborate tax scam.
Remember that class bemoaning the rising tide of crime, the transgressions of the poor, and wondering what the world was coming to? At least two banks were engaged in the fraud from an early stage and the banks, corporately, got in on the act from the middle of the 1980s onwards and all engaged in massive tax fraud through the DIRT tax. And again accountants aided and abetted them.
One of the most spectacular scandals of all involved the industry then at the core of the Irish economy, the food processing industry. The State's resources were put at the disposal of the largest of such companies and they abused it wholesale, selling millions and millions of pounds of intervention beef to Iraq, while insured against non-payment by the Irish State. No benefit to the people of Ireland, massive risk to the people of Ireland, all arranged by compliant politicians. Farmers and the veterinary profession got in on the act with the scam over the bovine tuberculosis scheme which cost the State millions and millions, most of it ripped off.
And all during this time the agency responsible for ensuring a modicum of fairness in the distribution of the nation's resources, the Revenue Commissioners, were playing dead. They knew all along that massive tax evasion was going on and offered excuse after excuse for doing damn all about it.
How possibly could that have happened if there was not something very peculiar going on within the Revenue Commissioners? The Committee of Public Accounts, which almost drowned in self-congratulation over its DIRT investigations (it found out precisely nothing new about the DIRT scam over and above what the Comptroller and Auditor General found out), made no serious attempt to find out how the Revenue Commissioners could deliberately ignore such a major scam over so many years. And it is this same agency that we look to now to bring to justice those to whom they ostentatiously turned a blind eye for so long.
During this time a high-profile company associated with highprofile business types went on the stock market, and it was believed that the shares were manipulated to the benefit of an insider elite while the "ordinary" shareholders were ripped off. No investigation by anybody, not by the stock exchange, the Garda, nor any government department, nothing.
At the same time a media company engaged in a spectacular fraud. Again the dogs in the street knew about it and again nothing was done, not to this day, and the people who benefited have flaunted their ill-gotten wealth for decades.
And, yes, we have to write in these coy terms about all that because they know we cannot provide proof that will stand up in court (witnesses are afraid to give public evidence but willing to tell the full story "off the record") and they will sue the ass off us if given a chink of opportunity.
The super-rich are probably less involved in tax fraud nowadays than used to be the case and there is a simple explanation for this. It is that they scarper and don't pay any income tax at all. How many of the Irish super-rich now live where they say they live? I have been trying to find out from one of these for years where he lives. A simple question but is there an answer? This person has paid almost no income tax anywhere for decades and decades and, far from getting the public disapprobation he spectacularly deserves, he is almost revered - by some anyway.
How is it that there is not the simple provision in our tax legislation that all income earned in Ireland is subjected to Irish income tax? How is it that all income is not treated as income, for instance capital gains, which are taxed at less than half the rate of income tax? How is it that every Budget for the last 15 years has jumped through hoops to favour the rich over the poor in one way or another?
And during all that time corruption in the planning process and at local government level was rife. Bundles of money were being carted to councillors and officials to buy permissions and zonings. Again the dogs in the street knew about it and the authorities did nothing or almost nothing - there was a limp Garda investigation in the early 70s and that was it.
It isn't that Ireland is uniquely corrupt; it is that it is grossly unfair. In a way that most Western countries are unfair. Unfair in its treatment of the crimes of the rich, with how it treats the crimes of the poor, unfair in the distribution of its resources, unfair in its educational and health services, unfair in its legal system. The rich have bought the political system and we should not be surprised that the political system delivers. That is what and where it is all about.