Dermot Quigley was apologetic. In one sense it had been the best of years for the Revenue Commissioners: the overall tax take, at £23.89 billion, was higher than ever.
But, the chairman acknowledged, it had also been among the worst of years. The Public Accounts Committee had subjected the Revenue to close scrutiny during its inquiry into tax evasion and bogus accounts.
Its report criticised the failures of the Revenue, the Central Bank and the Department of Finance almost as vigorously as it damned the sly connivance of the retail banks.
Quigley summed up one consequence for the Revenue: "Tax evasion in earlier years has undermined public confidence in tax administration, while the booming economy has also put new pressures on our people."
It was an understatement. The scandal uncovered by the DIRT inquiry was bound to make it difficult to persuade those who pay their taxes that the system was fair.
As for the new pressures on Revenue, Joseph Marron, a tax inspector, covered the ground in a letter to The Irish Times on Monday. "We have an `Upstairs, Downstairs' style of management," he wrote, "where the top management behaves like aristocrats and the inspectors are treated like scullery maids and footmen.
"Where top management can behave like an absentee landlord demanding higher productivity but remain blind to the difficulties which inspectors experience. Of course, there is nobody more blind than top managers who refuse to open their eyes to a problem."
What seems to be wrong in the Revenue Commissioners is what's undeniably wrong in the State. This is an "Upstairs, Downstairs" society in which different standards apply to the would-be gentry and the rest of us. We, too, have our absentee landlords, nowadays known as tax exiles; our top managers, Ahern, Harney and McCreevy, also refuse to open their eyes to problems or pretend, after three years in office, that they hadn't spotted them until now.
On their way to meet the social partners on Thursday, Ahern waffled about welfare; Harney mused that the country was awash with money and McCreevy blithely doubled his estimate of inflation.
All as if they were sleepwalking. As if it were none of their business.
Had they looked about them they might have noticed how social cohesion is crumbling, heard warnings of strikes and forecasts of increasing homelessness, taken in the latest news of rising levels of drug addiction and the need for places for disturbed children.
They might even have crossed the Castle yard to watch their erstwhile leader demonstrate how, in this "Upstairs, Downstairs" world, anything is possible when reality is not allowed to intervene.
For Charles Haughey ignoring or dismissing reality has been a way of life. When he left the Four Courts after a jury had acquitted him of conspiracy to import arms in 1970, his first words to his followers were: "Fellow patriots." (Not guilty, but patriotic.) It was an impression he cultivated when he sought support in the party. It added to the mystique. He refused to be questioned about it at press conferences or in interviews, as he refused to be questioned about the source of his wealth.
When challenged on other issues, in the Dail or outside, he often gave dismissive or contradictory answers, as if the challenger had no right to ask and he was under no obligation to answer. Asked about arms or money, he stared in angry silence.
This week he told John Coughlan of the Moriarty tribunal that debt was of minor importance relative to his other, political problems.
But money - and the need to hold power so that he could attract funds - was at the root of many blatant contradictions, as when he campaigned against the Anglo-Irish Agreement, and divorce, in the 1980s.
And the idea that he should not be in debt to banks or financial institutions was curious when he so readily sought and accepted funds elsewhere.
It's equally curious that some who still support him - as Vincent Browne does with simpering admiration - fail to see how he undermined his offices as Taoiseach and party leader and left himself open to accusations of corruption.
Brian Cowen told Rodney Rice what it felt like for the majority of people in Fianna Fail to have aspersions cast on their party. Individuals, however important, he argued, hadn't done anything with the agreement, consent, authority or prior knowledge of the party.
Of course not. Haughey was unlikely to call a party meeting to discuss his finances. But do the names Ray Burke, Padraig Flynn, John Ellis, Denis Foley and Liam Lawlor mean anything to the occasionally forgetful Cowen? Whose electoral strategist is due to appear before the Flood tribunal in the autumn and whose head office is having difficulty explaining why certain contributors to party funds were anonymous in a list sent down to the Castle?
Even the backbenchers named here were deputies with special responsibilities, some of them strangely attached to public standards. Ellis was supposed to look after the interests of farmers; Foley was a member of the Public Accounts Committee and Lawlor was chairman, no less, of the Members' Interests Committee. Burke, Ellis, Foley and Lawlor are or were members of the present Dail and the Fianna Fail parliamentary party. All were appointed to the offices they held in the present Dail by Ahern.
And, as I write, his officials are once more trying to jog Ahern's memory on a controversial issue - the leaking of Cabinet information which found its way to one of Frank Dunlop's clients, Owen O'Callaghan.
The information - on limiting the size of supermarket developments - was commercially sensitive and subject to Cabinet confidentiality. But, so far, Ahern can't recall having seen or heard of it. Another case for tree climbing in north Dublin?