OPINION:LAST FRIDAY, a little shyster was up before the Dublin District Court. Ali Ashgar was running a hostel for illegal immigrants. As a cover, he claimed that it was a college of Chinese medicine. He charged his guests €1,500 a year, supposedly as the registration fee for the college. There is a simple and perfectly understandable name for his crime, writes Fintan O'Toole.
It is called deception. It is a crime to knowingly deceive another person with the aim of making a gain for yourself or causing a loss to them.
Ali Ashgar got a fine of €5,000, and a five-month suspended prison sentence. Little creeps like him end up in court on deception charges all the time.
Recent cases include two men who tried to charge an elderly man in Gorey €1,600 to fix his gutters; a Meath woman who used someone else's credit card number to order clothes in Brown Thomas, and a man in Galway who tried to sell a dodgy digger for €8,000.
There's nothing complicated about any of this, either morally or legally. If you get caught lying to line your own pockets, you end up in court. Except, it seems, if you add a few zeros to the sum involved. Sell someone a piece of useless machinery for €8,000 - it's deception and you're up before a grumpy judge in a sordid courtroom, with all the other flotsam of shame and misery. Sell your shareholders €87 million worth of lies and it's what? Inappropriate and disappointing.
Even by Irish standards, the moral timidity surrounding Seán FitzPatrick's systematic deception of the shareholders of Anglo Irish Bank is staggering. It was summed up by a perfect denunciation reported in Colm Keena's piece on the affair in Saturday's Irish Times. He quoted a trenchant criticism of FitzPatrick's nauseating use of the word "inappropriate" to describe his own behaviour: "If you have a moral compass at all you know it's just wrong, wrong, wrong." And who was it who so brilliantly cut through the equivocating? "A banking academic who did not wish to be named."
This is what we've come to. An academic, who enjoys independence and intellectual freedom, is afraid to put his or her name to the simple statement that what Seán FitzPatrick did is "wrong, wrong, wrong." It's okay to put your name to a statement that hiding huge loans from your shareholders and thereby causing your company's accounts to be grossly misleading is merely "inappropriate from a transparency point of view".
But using the word "wrong" is so controversial that you have to hide behind anonymity.
Which brings us to that other weasel word - "disappointing". On yesterday's Morning Ireland on RTÉ radio, Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan added another twist to the mendacity in which this whole affair is steeped. He actually managed to lie about his own verbal pussyfooting on the FitzPatrick issue. Cathal Mac Coille put it to him that last week he had described FitzPatrick's behaviour as "disappointing" and that this was "a rather weak word".
Lenihan reared up on him and claimed, in a voice freighted with the hurt of a badly wronged man, that "No, I never said I was disappointed." He had in fact, he claimed, used the word only in relation to the failure of the Financial Regulator to inform his department of the loans.
MacCoille, understandably assuming that the Minister couldn't be lying, apologised for his mistake.
Except it wasn't a mistake. Lenihan's statement last week is absolutely clear: "The Minister expressed his disappointment at the circumstances surrounding the resignation of Mr Seán FitzPatrick as chairman but believes that strong corporate governance must be upheld by all financial institutions in the Irish financial system." The disappointment had nothing to do with the Financial Regulator - it was Lenihan's description of the behaviour that led to FitzPatrick's resignation. His own colleague Mary Coughlan, for example, understood this perfectly.
Later on Friday, she said of Lenihan: "As he said, he is disappointed about the actions, although not illegal."
Even more bizarrely, having tried to rewrite his own reaction to the scandal last week, Lenihan then went on to rewrite FitzPatrick's contemptible statement about "inappropriate" behaviour: "I believe it was, as he himself acknowledged in his statement, wrong, unethical behaviour." FitzPatrick's statement did not contain the words "wrong" or "unethical" or any synonyms. What we have is the surreal situation of the Minister for Finance spinning for a banker who was involved in large-scale systematic deception. He feels it necessary, not only to mislead the public about his own pathetic reaction to the scandal, but to pretend that FitzPatrick actually acknowledged the concept of morality.
Why do we have this neurotic dance around the simple word "wrong"? Why do we have the double standard by which little shysters who lie about thousands of euro are crooks, but heroic entrepreneurs who lie about tens of millions do not, in FitzPatrick's words, "in any way breach banking or legal regulations"?
Could it be that since we've decided to bet the house on the bankers, we have to maintain the fiction that they're all fine fellows?