The call by PAYE saps should be, we want our money back

In November 1993 Maurice Doyle, then the governor of the Central Bank, gave a talk to the Philosophical Society at Trinity College Dublin on the subject, "Recession - Is There a Way Out?". He had decided to speak out on matters of public policy, among them "the high tax burden imposed on labour". He was concerned that "the PAYE sector shoulders a disproportionate burden of income tax." He felt that there was "ample scope for the income tax net to be further widened" so that the burden could be spread more evenly.

But he was also worried about "the sizeable black economy in Ireland". He pointed to the activities of those he referred to as "fraudsters". The wrongdoers he targeted were bogus welfare claimants drawing the dole but "defrauding the system". He suggested that there were much larger numbers of these criminals than the public realised and that the two per cent fraud rate indicated by a Department of Social Welfare study might be "only the tip of the iceberg." And he spelled out what he felt were the damaging social effects of such crimes.

"Apart altogether from the question of fraud and the amount of money involved," he thundered, "the example set to the rest of the labour force by those who work and also draw the dole is corrosive of any spirit of enterprise in the community . . . Greater vigilance is required . . and those who do not actively seek work should not receive the welfare entitlements they are currently afforded.

"These comments may not be `politically correct' but they have to be made". This was the authentic expression of the official mind. Maurice Doyle was, and is, one of the most distinguished members of the public service, a man who had been, before being elevated to the Central Bank, secretary of the Department of Finance.

He was addressing real and immediate political concerns, seeking to explain to the population in general why income tax was so high and what could be done about it. He wanted to raise the spectre of the black economy, of cheats, of fraud. But to him, it seemed, the black economy was about fellas doing nixers. The cheats were chancers turning up at the dole office every week with their pockets bulging with under-the-counter cash payments. The fraudsters were shifty members of the underclass, up to every trick in the book, giving a bad example to the honest, decent workers.

We now know from his evidence to the Committee of Public Accounts and from the report of the Comptroller and Auditor General that the Central Bank, which Maurice Doyle headed, was well aware that there were many other "fraudsters" who were "defrauding the system" by evading tax through bogus non-resident bank accounts. In 1986, for example, the Central Bank was told by Allied Irish Banks that "up to £600 million of non-resident deposit accounts may be misclassified i.e. they were deposits from Irish residents".

In April 1991 the group financial director of AIB told the Central Bank that "AIB had a contingent liability amounting to some hundreds of millions of pounds virtually going back to the introduction of DIRT."

The people who were using these bogus accounts to defraud the Revenue, and the banks which facilitated their crimes, were respectable and well off citizens, setting a bad example for the labour force. Their actions clearly had an important impact on the public finances, on tax equity, and on many of the other areas that the governor of the Central Bank addressed in his speech.

But Maurice Doyle did not feel that tough, politically incorrect comments had to be made about them. He did not call in their case for greater vigilance to prevent the compliant taxpayer from being defrauded. On the subject of this kind of fraud he, and the official elite to which he belonged, were inclined to silence.

This silence is eloquent, for it tells us more than any torrent of words about the assumptions that have shaped the Ireland we now inhabit. In the painful process of adjusting the Irish economy to the demands of the global marketplace, there was no room for doubt about who should bear the pain: the old people lying on trolleys in hospital corridors, the children in damp, overcrowded classrooms, the Ryanair generation who had the good grace to feck off to America when the elite declared, "We can't all live on a small island."

While they were to see the stern face of State austerity, their betters were to get off scot free. All through the years in which boomtime Ireland was being formed what might - for want of a better word - be called the Establishment made sure that three basic ideas became part of the consensus. There is not much money in Ireland ("We are," as Charles Haughey admonished us, "living beyond our means."). The crisis in the public finances is entirely about public spending. The worst parasites are dole-scroungers and welfare cheats.

Each of these was a brazen lie. There was a lot of money around but much of it was hidden in bogus accounts. The current budget deficit was out of control, not just because the State was spending too much but also because it was failing to collect vast sums that it was owed. And the big cheats were farmers, shopkeepers, business people - pillars of the community.

Many people in the elite knew these things but chose not to reveal them.

So there are, in a sense, two national debts. There is the one that is owed by the State to the banks and international lending agencies. And there is the one that is owed by the commercial banks and by their fraudulent customers to the people who bore the brunt of creating the boom.

It was taken from the dignity and health of the sick, from the education of the young, from the already meagre chances of the deprived, from the desolate middle years of the redundant.

And it is, to coin a phrase, payback time. The Committee of Public Accounts is doing a fine job of calling those responsible to account. But this time there has to be a more tangible accounting.

Every red cent that was diddled from the community has to be returned with interest. And it must be returned, not to some general Exchequer fund, but personally and individually to those from whom it was taken. Every poor PAYE sap who paid the penal taxes of those years should get a cheque in the post, as a tangible sign that a gross injustice is being remedied.

We have gone beyond expecting to see the fraudsters in jail. We have gone beyond hoping for the slightest sign of repentance from the sleek men who profited from the scams. So, since money is the only thing these people understand, let's see its colour. If we have any self-respect left, the call should be clear and implacable: we want our money back.