Sir, - To use journalistic argot, the recent torrent of revelations about tax cheating from the Comptroller and Auditor General, as well as the Moriarty, Flood and Hamilton tribunals, might be a source of horror, but hardly of shock. Anybody who has taken even a moderate interest in these matters over the past 20 years had a pretty good idea what was going on. The scale may raise a eyebrow or two, but not the fact.
Neither should we delude ourselves that this was just a game for the golden circle. The Irish equivalent of Leona Helmsley's observation that only little people pay taxes is that only mugs pay taxes. For every questionable account in the Cayman Islands, there were many more in the Miltown Malbays of this land.
Attitudes to paying tax are, in some ways, a broader reflection of attitudes to the community in which we live. Presumably tax cheats see what they do in terms of putting one over on the taxman or possibly the government. They do not perceive their actions in terms of defrauding their fellow citizens or failing to make a fair contribution to the community as a whole. A similar mentality applies to much tax avoidance. Artificial tax avoidance schemes, Disneyland schemes as Albert Reynolds once colourfully described them, are just as symptomatic of a lack of a true sense of citizenship. Put bluntly, it is the belief that one is a fool to contribute to the communal good if one can avoid doing so, no matter how arcane the means or obscure the loophole used.
Whatever about not rocking the boat in the 1980s, there is no excuse now for not taking rigorous steps to establish once and for all a culture of compliance. Taxes are the price we pay for a free and civilised society. To see the impact of really wide-scale non-payment of taxes one has only to look at the state of Russia today. Whatever about the legal niceties, tax dodging is a statement of certain social values and the depressing reality is that, in Ireland, those values have, up to now, been all too widely shared.
It would be nice to think that the current catharsis is the harbinger of a new age; an age when Irish citizens cease to regard evading tax as a socially admirable achievement and look on it as what it is - a deeply antisocial practice. Were such a change to occur, it would be one sign that, as a community, we are finally beginning to mature. - Yours, etc.,
Frank E. Bannister, Blackrock, Co Dublin.