By Shane Ross From INDEPENDENT IE

Give us a break. Stifle the phoney outrage. We all knew that certain Fianna Fail TDs were as crooked as bent nails in the Sixties and Seventies.

If there was a few hot bob on offer, if there was a drunk-driving charge to be fixed, if there was a planning scam, they would be bang in the middle of it. Their street cred with the faithful would have been shot if they were not the first to deliver the brown envelope.

Ansbacher was the scam to beat all scams. Friends of Charles Haughey and his accountant Des Traynor benefited from the offshore wheeze. They evaded tax on interest on their deposits by hiding the cash in the Cayman Islands.

Each culprit was what Socialist TD Joe Higgins famously dubbed “Ansbacherman” – a dodgy businessman with golden circle links. Nearly all were linked to Fianna Fail.

Ansbacherman was buried. Settlements were made with the Revenue Commissioners. No offender was ever prosecuted. Eyebrows were raised . . . but nothing more serious happened. While the Revenue did deals with the Ansbachermen, the gardai observed from a distance.

Ten days ago a new creature was revealed. ‘Super Ansbacherman’ entered our lives.

Thanks to a whistleblower – a civil servant directly involved in uncovering the original Ansbacherman – we caught a glimpse of this supreme Ansbacher animal. A registered letter landed in the lap of all 13 of us on the Dail’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC). It revealed an Ansbacher “holy of holies” – or what the whistleblower dubbed “the black briefcase”.

New names surfaced. The Ansbacher elite was unmasked.

Of the nine TDs’ names printed in the latest roll of honour, five are still alive while four are dead. At the time of these Ansbacher activities all were Fianna Fail. One Fine Gael TD was named elsewhere in documents enclosed with the letter. A few – more tenuous – Fine Gael connections are mentioned.

Presumably none of the “black briefcase” brigade – many well-advised in Cayman Trust law by a Fine Gael lawyer – ever repaid a penny. Either they died, or they are still sitting on their gains.

Outing Fianna Fail TDs for evading tax has its attractions, but the whistleblower asked a more probing question. Where did the TDs’ original lump sums for these large deposits come from?

Politicians do not get rich out of their salaries. Yet there seems to have been no shortage of cash in the ranks of the Fianna Fail TDs.

The whistleblower’s documents offer a possible answer: “There was a strong possibility that some of the lodgements to the senior Fianna Fail TDs’ Cayman accounts may have related to planning matters.”

Wow. So the ‘Super Ansbacher’ guys took bribes and illegally stuffed the cash in the Caymans. The proceeds of bribery attracted no tax on the interest. A double whammy.

Ireland sounds like a pretty sick society back in those days. Even so, what’s new in the whistleblower’s package delivered to PAC members?

Top people hid their ill-gotten gains and fiddled their tax in Sixties and Seventies Ireland. Fianna Fail was better at it than Fine Gael. Labour was not at the races. It was the norm at the time. Or so goes the narrative of the apologists.

Much more serious is the whistleblower’s charge that Ireland’s state agencies were aiding and abetting their politicians’ illegal activities. Neither the gardai nor the Revenue Commissioners were moving against political suspects. The entire system was rotten to the core.

The whistleblower’s conclusions are a telling indictment of the activities of agencies of the State in the very week when one of them – the Garda – got a new boss.

And who was she? None other than the boss of another state agency, the Revenue Commissioners. Josephine Fehily, chairman of the Revenue Commissioners, had been due to retire in January. Last Thursday it was revealed that she will instead soon take the short journey from Dublin Castle to Phoenix Park.

There was no real recruitment process. Josephine was simply lifted from the Revenue Commissioners to the Garda Authority by her patron – Justice Minister Frances FitzGerald.

Her selection was a formality.

According to Fitzgerald, the Government “looked at” a few CVs and plumped for Josephine. She is a political appointee.

Josephine is a woman with great ability, undoubted integrity, engaging humility, humour and humanity. There is no reason for believing that she let us down while at the Revenue. Equally, there is no reason to believe that she is the best candidate for the chair of the Garda Authority.

Welcome to the same old way of making appointments. Gentle Josephine bounces out of the tax office, is lifted out of retirement and parachuted straight into the Garda Authority.

Whatever happened to Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform Brendan Howlin’s promises that he will introduce a new charter for state appointments?

Heads of the Revenue Commissioners lead charmed lives.

Josephine’s predecessor at the Revenue, Frank Daly, found himself appointed – by the Fianna Fail government – to the board of Anglo Irish Bank after he left his public servant position. After that, reliable Frank became chairman of Nama.

Neither job appointment was subject to rigorous processes. Frank had the inside track.

Josephine will be fine in the integrity stakes, but will be critically short on garda expertise. But what about her successor?

Politicians have now been confirmed as patrons of the chair of the new, squeaky-clean Garda Authority. The links between ministers, the Revenue and the gardai are unhealthy.

Of course, no wrongdoing was done on Josephine’s watch, but the structure is there to allow less scrupulous practitioners to control both state agencies.

In the years to come, Ansbacher could be repeated over and over again. A crooked minister will be able to refer allegations to a State body, in the certain knowledge that they will go no further.

After the publicity attached to Declan Costello’s bank account in Guinness & Mahon, the judiciary too is being challenged Perhaps they are not all whited sepulchres. Yet it is high time that their financial activities came under scrutiny. Judges, like politicians, should be forced to declare their business interests.

Dream on. This is Ireland.

So who is going to investigate the latest revelations? Where do we turn? Last week PAC members were told by the State’s lawyers that the latest whistleblower’s revelations about Ansbacher were pretty well outside their current remit. Some members were incredulous.

Why were they surprised? The way Ireland works, the odds are heavily stacked in favour of Ansbacherman.

IMAGES:

Fianna Fail leader Charles Haughey

Des Traynor and Charles Haughey. But has the original Ansbacherman been superceded by a new breed?

For more on this story go to: http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/shane-ross/ansbacherman-returns-to-haunt-official-ireland-30746282.html

See also iNews Cayman related story published November 10 2014 “Des Traynor – Irish elite’s top money manager [he sent millions to Cayman Islands]” at: http://www.ieyenews.com/wordpress/des-traynor-irish-elites-top-money-manager-he-sent-millions-to-cayman-islands/