Why did they do it? Why, in the 1980s and early 1990s, did a very significant layer of the Irish bourgeoisie withdraw from the State and from any real sense of social obligation? What made a whole swathe of business people, from farmers and shopkeepers up to co-called captains of industry and icons of public and private enterprise, opt out of Ireland? It will take a long time for us to come to terms with what is now being revealed and even longer for us to re-order our society to take account of it. That process will have to include a long and painstaking process of trial and punishment. For the moment, the best we can do is try to explain, however inadequately, the treason of the elite.
One obvious explanation, of course, is that they did it because they could get away with it. Impunity is a great incentive and these people had every reason to believe that they wouldn't be touched. They knew they lived in a culture that defined the seriousness of a crime, not just by the damage it did, but by the social class of the criminal. They knew that white-collar crime was, in this culture, almost a contradiction in terms.
Fraud was rarely prosecuted. Wealthy tax cheats, at worst, did quiet deals with the Revenue. If you came from the lower classes, you could go to jail for stealing a handbag. If you came from the respectable middle classes and you committed your crimes through bankers and accountants, you had as much chance of going to jail as your Persian cat had of winning the dog show.
You could see that a man like the property speculator Patrick Gallagher, jailed for fraud in Northern Ireland, was never even prosecuted for the same activities in the Republic.
In Pretty Boy Floyd, Woody Guthrie, with his wry drawl, sang about this kind of culture:
As through this world I've travelled,
I've seen lots of funny men.
Some will rob you with a six-gun
And some with a fountain pen.
In modernising Ireland, six-gun robbery was a heinous crime but fountain-pen robbery wasn't. Self-appointed revolutionaries in berets and dark glasses were regarded as subversives; self-satisfied fat cats in Armani suits, though equally intent on undermining the State, were not.
In the specific case of tax evasion, it wasn't just that this was a crime that was almost never prosecuted. There was huge official ambivalence about whether it was a crime at all. If you think this statement is an exaggeration, have a look at the Memorandum for Government on the 1993 tax amnesty, published in this newspaper this week . One of the provisions mentioned in the memorandum is that there should be no amnesty for "the proceeds of crime".
The irony is that the amnesty was intended for money on which tax had been unlawfully evaded. By definition, if tax evasion was a crime, all of this money was "the proceeds of crime". Logically, if there was no amnesty for the proceeds of crime, there could be no amnesty at all. But only in a footnote do the authors of the memorandum acknowledge the contradiction and add "if, indeed, a distinction can be made between evasion and other crime". Of course, that distinction ran through the whole culture of tax evasion.
THE sense of impunity was immensely strengthened by the knowledge that the corruption of which they were a part came right from the top. It is tempting, with the current revelations, to see Charles Haughey's venality as just another small part of the rampant greed and cynicism of the ruling class.
But Haughey and his gang were much more than an expression of the culture to which they belonged. They also did a great deal to create, sustain and validate that culture. These were men, after all, who openly boasted on television of their power to offer awkward members of the Garda Siochana the choice between a pint and a transfer.
These were people who could warn their opponents, as one Fianna Fail lawyer did on a famous occasion, that "Fianna Fail will be in power for a long time and has a long memory".
These were people who understood that power in Ireland operated in mysterious ways, whether it was through paying an official like George Redmond for "advice" on planning applications in Dublin or slipping into a hotel at election time to make a disinterested contribution to the operation of the democratic system.
It wasn't just that knowing the right people was like wearing a cloak of invulnerability. It was also that there were two kinds of State to which you could give your allegiance. There was the official explicit State, encoded in institutions and laws, and there was the other personalised State in which individual men had privatised public power. At a local level, there was George Redmond's "I was the [county] council". At a higher one, there was Charles Haughey's various re-iterations of Louis XIV's L'etat, c'est moi.
In a perverse sense, by being loyal to these people you could be loyal to "the State". If the State was no more than a collection of private interests, the obligation of the good citizen was to make the right contributions at the right time, accept a share of the spoils and honour the code of secrecy.
YOU could almost convince yourself that this was, at some level, legal. The people who got involved in the Ansbacher scam knew that its fountainhead, Des Traynor, was Haughey's bag-man. That knowledge created a sense, not just of impunity, but of a kind of unofficial legality. As Richard Nixon's spokesman famously put it during the Watergate scandal: "If the president does it, that means it's not illegal." If the Taoiseach does it, it must be alright.
What's striking now is how this culture seems to have transcended traditional divisions within the elite between the old professional and business class and the new upwardly mobile moneymen, between, in the broadest terms, Fine Gael and Fianna Fail. Haughey and his circle may have shifted the ground but it seems clear that many who would have regarded themselves as a better class of person - Jesuit boys, rugby players, members of exclusive clubs, people who could trace their comfort back at least a few generations - were all too willing to step onto it.
In the old set of bankers, lawyers and accountants, there were many who embraced the new snobbery in which the crucial distinction was not between sleek old money and raw new recruits to the elite, but between those who did not have a choice about paying tax and those who did. The ability to evade taxes had become the ultimate mark of distinction between those who were in and those who were, and always would be, out.
Of course, all of this was greatly helped by the fact that the main source of morality, the Catholic Church, was more interested in what happened in bedrooms than in boardrooms. It was helped, too, by the general worship of the business elite in key parts of the media, where the ability to become rich was increasingly seen as heroic. But let's not lose sight of the fact that the people who took part in these scams were the creators, and not the victims, of a corrupt culture.