They knew naathing . . . neither the Governor of the Central Bank nor a phalanx of executives from Allied Irish Banks. It was amazing how fragmented and partial records could be in the most file-conscious of institutions when large amounts of money were at risk.

Jim Mitchell and members of his committee tried. They even asked the odd hard question. But the information either wasn't available or it was damned by the witnesses as inaccurate and undependable.

As an exercise in blame-sharing and muck-spreading, the Dail inquiry was a classic. The well-worn excuses that had preceded the establishment of the Beef Tribunal - official ignorance and a noncompliant business culture - were given a fresh airing.

And while points of conflict between the various interest groups were identified by the Dail Committee as a result of a long day of questioning, no fresh information was elicited about buckshee offshore accounts or taxes due to the State. The day started badly when the Governor of the Central Bank showed his gums on behalf of the public interest.

Teeth were something that might be grown in the future, Mr O'Connell suggested, if the Government empowered the Bank to police the financial sector arising from the present controversy. But the Bank and his predecessors had concentrated on issues involving prudential supervision and the liquidity of the system.

Even allowing for the supine record of the Central Bank on offshore accounts and financial institutions - and the Ansbacher accounts in particular - the Governor's evidence about its cosy relationship with AIB was startling.

On being advised AIB had a problem with its internal audit in 1990, alarm bells had failed to ring. The bank that had given us the ICI debacle in the mid-1980s and a levy on every insurance policy in the State to bail it out, was in trouble again.

But, apparently, neither Mr O'Connell's predecessor nor his officials thought it necessary to launch their own inquiry into the extent of the problem. Instead, they accepted a suggestion from AIB that its liability amounted to £5 million. And they didn't even ask to see details of AIB's own internal audit.

After that catalogue of failures, the Governor assured committee members the banking climate had changed dramatically in recent years, particularly since the passage of the Criminal Justice Act on money laundering in 1996. The Central Bank, he insisted, was now "well aware" of what was going on in the banking system.

But there might be a few remaining blind spots. Asked about Revenue figures that showed £17 billion currently being held in 200,000 offshore accounts, Mr O'Connell admitted the figure was high by international standards. But, rather than accept the likelihood that earlier bogus accounts had metamorphosed into these deposits, he ascribed the phenomenon to the "Celtic Tiger" and to our status as a trading nation.

As for the details of AIB's DIRT difficulties, Mr O'Connell appeared to depend more on newspaper reports than on the Bank's records.

And then we had the head honchos of the AIB, led by the group chief executive, Tom Mulcahy. They just wanted to put the record straight, he said, as the top executives of the State's largest bank circled the wagons before the Dail committee.

The first objective of the public relations exercise was to spread the muck: Mr Mulcahy insisted that DIRT evasion and bogus offshore accounts had been "an industry-wide issue". And just in case the committee didn't get the message, he told them that State-owned banks had been at it too.

So, if AIB had broken the law and encouraged and facilitated tax evasion, then so had everybody else.

It was the line taken by the Department of Agriculture when allegations first arose of corruption in the Irish beef industry - they were all at it in Europe, so Irish firms had to compete.

Then Mr Mulcahy played the role of the compliant banker. AIB had accepted the proposals of the Revenue in an attempt to deal with the "problem" and had done all that was asked of it.

There had been a clear understanding the deal would close the door on the past, with no liabilities, no penalties and no publicity, his supporting cast insisted. Nobody even contemplated owing back taxes because of the approach taken by Revenue, they said.

But Mr Mulcahy was on marshy ground where DIRT liabilities were concerned. Insisting that AIB hadn't misled the Revenue about the extent of the problem, he said the bank had increased its DIRT contributions by £13.6 million between 1990 and 1992 to regularise the position.

In later questioning, however, Mr Mulcahy was unable to quantify either the number of bogus accounts turned up by an internal investigation, or the amount of DIRT rightly due to Revenue. So who decided on £13.6 million? And how much of that sum was made up of higher interest rates and tax changes?

Finally, the chief executive rubbished the "leaked" documentation which had generated the public controversy in the first place. The figure of £100 million liability used by Tony Spollen, former head of internal audit, was "seriously unrealistic", he said, and was based on "off-the-cuff" estimates by Jimmy O'Mahony, a former head of group taxation.

Mr Mulcahy could not accept that 60 per cent of AIB's non-residential accounts, numbering 53,000, had been bogus. But neither could he quantify the real extent of the problem or the number of accounts that had been discontinued as a result of internal action. Just in case AIB customers were becoming restive, Mr Mulcahy assured them that any outstanding DIRT liabilities would be paid by the bank. They need not worry on that score. The less trouble the better.

There were lots of questions after that but few satisfactory answers. What emerged was a determination by AIB to fight the Revenue and the State tooth and claw to avoid any DIRT impositions. And a clear conflict of evidence emerged between AIB and the Revenue over whether an effective DIRT "amnesty" had been on offer in 1991.

Given all the law-breaking involved in setting up and operating these bogus accounts, everybody was remarkably relaxed. It was already becoming old news. Even the Government was having second thoughts about the need to grant more investigative legal powers to the committee.

If we didn't know any better, people might think tax evasion had gone out of fashion.