Leinster House DIRT probe starts

BY ROBBIE MacGABHANN

     
Given that Sean Doherty as a minister was no stranger to controversy and that Jim Mitchell and Pat Rabbitte were also ministers in governments that ignored the DIRT debâcle, one wonders how qualified they are to play the role of moral inquisitor
``I don't think it lends itself to a yes or no decision''. This was just one of the incredulous assertions of Paddy Mullarkey ,current secretary general of the Department of Finance, at the Leinster House Public Accounts inquiry this week. Mullarkey's contribution was one in a long line of similar ones from him and other government officials who ran rings around their TD inquisitors.

Mullarkey is only one of an array of top civil servants past and present who have been or will be called to account on how and why successive Dublin governments, their civil servants, the Revenue Commissioners and the banking sector allowed serious breaches of finance and tax legislation to go unchecked for over ten years. They are appearing before the strangely titled SubCommittee on Certain Revenue Matters.

This week, it is the officials from the Finance Department and the Central Bank who have been called to account. In the coming days and weeks, we will see a range of representatives from the state's bureaucratic, financial and political elite give evidence before the Public Accounts Committee.

The first two days of the hearings have been an eye opener into both the inner workings of the Central Bank and the Finance Department. They have also given an interesting portrait of some of our elected representatives acting as public inquisitors.

In terms of the bureaucrats who administer the 26-County government and its agencies, the message from the subcommittee is not good. Former Secretary General of the Department of Finance, Sean Cromien and former Central Bank Governor Maurice Doyle wrapped up the committee in a web of tediously long answers to simple questions, endless arguments over definitions and the meaning of this term or that.

Paddy Mullarkey and Maurice O'Connell took up the baton and with their officials wriggled and wriggled through the subcommittee questioning. This is not to say that these top ranking civil and public servants were guilty of any misdemeanours.

What can be said was that they were incapable of answering a yes or no question. They seemed unwilling to offer a plain simple answer to the most innocuous of questions.

At one stage there was a debate over how you would describe the capacity of the Central Bank to regulate the banking sector. They didn't have ``powerful'' regulations but they could be described as ``robust'' or ``stout''.

The proceedings of the subcommittee are being televised on ``TG4 beo''. You could be forgiven for thinking you had stumbled upon an extended episode of Yes Minister.

This applies not only to the soliloquies of the civil servants under the spotlight but also to the TDs doing the questioning. Sean Doherty, Sean Ardagh, Pat Rabbitte, Bernard Durkan and Jim Mitchell all gave good Jim Hacker impersonations playing perplexed and bamboozled elected representatives.

Given that Sean Doherty as a minister was no stranger to controversy and that Jim Mitchell and Pat Rabbitte were also ministers in governments that ignored the DIRT debâcle, one wonders how qualified they are to play the role of moral inquisitor.

What is clear from the two initial sessions of the subcommittee is that there was knowledge at the most senior level of the civil service, the Revenue Commissioners and within the cabinet of tax evasion.

In the case of the civil servants, they all maintained it was a political issue.

For his part, Central Bank Governor Maurice O'Connell managed to provide a range of plausible reasons as to why the financial sector regulator did not act on the unpaid DIRT tax and the obvious breach in banking legislation.

To some, he actually made a compelling argument as to why the Central Bank should cease its role as a banking regulator and be replaced with a more democratic and accountable body.

That, though, is an issue for another day. For now, we can all watch TV democracy Irish-style, with it many warts and flaws. TG4 is showing it most weekdays from 11am to 6pm.