Famous Five recount fear of flying funds

It was like a This Is Your Life special on the Celtic Tiger. The chairman of the Committee of Public Accounts, Jim Mitchell, became Eamonn Andrews for a day at the continued DIRT hearings yesterday, as he ushered in five former finance ministers to remind the Irish economy that it wasn't always rich and famous.

"You may be a fat cat now," he might have told the economy, "but 13 years ago, you were just a mangy little scut. Remember this voice?" And sure enough it was John Bruton, Minister for Finance in the last days of the Fine Gael/Labour coalition, explaining the desperate financial background against which DIRT was born.

It was the return of Ray "Mac the Knife" MacSharry, however, which caused most nostalgia. He introduced himself as Ray-mond MacSharry, stressing the second syllable of his Christian name in a way that suggested he'd spent too long in Europe. But Mac was back in town yesterday, and he'd lost none of his edge.

He went straight into the attack, rubbishing an "unsigned, undated" AIB document already presented to the committee which suggested he had given verbal indications in 1987 that "inspectability" of DIRT accounts would not arise.

"Utter and complete nonsense," he said.

When counsel twice suggested he had not been particularly enthusiastic about "beating the compliance drum" while finance minister, he brushed this aside, too. He had no time for beating drums yesterday, anyway, because he had his hands full blowing his own trumpet: recalling speeches that proved not only his intolerance of tax evasion, but reminded us how his 1987 budget stopped the economic rot.

Forced by Dail deadlines to interview all the former ministers in one five-hour session, the committee made brisk progress. It was High Noon, aptly enough, when a minister for finance famous for once getting himself photographed in a cowboy hat took the stand, and quickly shot down counsel's best question with a joke.

Asked if he accepted that even the "dogs in the street" knew about the extent of bogus accounts, Albert Reynolds quipped that he had great respect for the same dogs: "They're my customers, from time to time."

But the seeds of the DIRT problem had been well sown by the time he took office, and the questioning reflected that fact.

Even more so in the case of Bertie Ahern and, finally, Ruairi Quinn: the latter probably the first finance minister - thanks to the therapeutic effects of the boom - to conquer fully the fear of flying funds that crippled his predecessors.

Indeed, the repeated mention of the phrase "fear of flight of capital" yesterday might have launched yet another political acronym - FOFOC. "We can't do that, FOFOC's sake," seems to have been a common expression around the Department of Finance in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But it might be too rude for inclusion in the dictionary.

There wasn't much else to show from the day. How 12 years of DIRT resulted in a situation where the State had 300,000 bogus non-resident accounts was a mystery not even yesterday's Famous Five could solve, and Enid Blyton would have struggled for a title. Five claim the Revenue Commissioners never said anything? Five are shocked, frankly, shocked and disappointed?