THE CLIENTS: The 1980s were tough times, but we are only now learning how many of the wealthy and well-connected tried to ease the pain, writes Emmet Oliver
The names were always going to be the cream in the Ansbacher report, and so it proved. The 190 clients of Ansbacher identified in the report were the crème de la crème of business and the professions in Ireland in the 1980s.
The architects named in it were not small practitioners turning a fee in the tough 1980s from designing kitchen extensions. Sam Stephenson, arguably the best-known architect in the State, has his section in the report. So, too, has Arthur Gibney, a former president of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland and currently president of the Royal Hibernian Academy.
The doctors who turned out to be Ansbacher clients include Maurice Neligan, the distinguished heart surgeon of Blackrock Clinic fame, and his wife.
A family doctor named in the report, Colm Killeen, may have explained to the inspectors that he ran a working-class general practice in Mountjoy Square in Dublin's north inner city, but he must have been one of the few GPs, then or now, to own a small aircraft. He explained to the inspectors how he drew down money from his funds with Des Traynor to pay for repairs to it.
A Cork doctor, Barry Collins, was better travelled than many of his colleagues at the time. He said he knew little about offshore accounts, but he had come in contact with the Cayman Islands - during a Caribbean cruise.
The builders mentioned in the report were not small-timers running up a couple of houses on infill sites. They included Seán McKeon and John Kennedy, former partners in Sheelin Homes, a company which built houses for the very upper end of the market in the Dublin area. Cramptons is also on the list - one of the longest-established firms in Ireland.
Ditto with hoteliers: it was P.V. Doyle - of the Berkeley Court, Burlington and others in the Doyle Group - and his son, David, who turn up in the report. When David Doyle withdrew his funds from the Ansbacher operation in the late 1980s, he was able to buy a Mercedes SL, which at the time cost between £80,000 and £90,000.
And of course there was Cement Roadstone Holdings Ltd and many of its leading executives - one of the biggest and most successful public companies in Ireland, run by men acknowledged as the State's leading business brains.
Des Traynor of Haughey Boland, then Guinness and Mahon and then CRH, is at the centre of it all. That much we knew, but what is also interesting is the extent to which he provided accountancy and offshore banking facilities for his friends and business associates.
There's Tony Barry, former chairman of CRH, making offshore trust fund arrangements for his children. In the web, too, is Dr Michael Dargan, also from the CRH stable, but additionally a Bank of Ireland board member and chairman of Aer Lingus. And Jim Culliton, former chief executive of CRH and the author of the famous Culliton Report, a blueprint for industrial policy. Des Traynor, meanwhile, was looking after some of Mr Culliton's own money - in the Cayman Islands.
In his evidence to the inspectors, Mr Culliton talks about Des Traynor's nervousness about revealing directors' bonuses in the CRH annual report. "Another reason I think he [Traynor] didn't want it to be seen in the annual report to have made a big £100,000 payment to me or £120,000 was that Mr Haughey had become Taoiseach in August 1987 and had brought in a sort of hair-shirt environment, where everything was frozen and there were cutbacks in the health services and so on."
These and others mentioned in the report may suffer some embarrassment, but the inspectors were careful to enter a caveat at the outset of their report. "It is important to bear in mind," they say, "that a finding that any particular individual is a client of Ansbacher is NOT a finding that that person has evaded tax."
The report names 147 people who beneficially owned funds in Ansbacher. Not all are household names by any means, but most of them must have been very comfortably off by the standards of the time.
As for why people got involved, it seems that the high tax rates at the time were a motivating factor. Jim Culliton suggests as much in his evidence to the inspectors: "I may have provoked his [Traynor's] offer to me, in that I probably was referring to the very high tax rates at the time - the top rates of tax in the 1970s were 70 to 77 per cent. He suggested this facility, I did not initiate it, I did not know about it."
These taxes, which were put in place by Finance Minister Richie Ryan - dubbed "Red Richie" at the time - and the Fine Gael/Labour government of the mid-1970s must have upset many people, particularly those who were hit hard by them. Running through the report are comments about the tax rates paid by people who became Ansbacher clients.
The super-rich, the report acknowledges in volume one, were not prepared to fall into line.
"To understand the background to the discretionary trust schemes operated by Guinness Mahon Cayman Trust, one must return to the early 1970s," it reminds us.
"In that era, personal tax rates were high and the political preparations were under way to introduce capital taxes such as capital gains, capital acquisitions and wealth tax. In these conditions, those with money were concerned about their financial future and were receptive to schemes that appeared to offer a measure of security."
Mr Traynor, even if he wrote out receipts and statements on the backs of envelopes and bits of paper, was that security for a select bunch of people.Through almost all of the evidence given under oath, the clients seemed to place huge trust in Traynor. Whether they understood precisely what was going on or were merely content to leave it to him, no questions asked, they displayed an abiding belief in Traynor.
Life in the Ireland of the 1980s, the period when the Ansbacher operation was at its height, was tough - high taxes, high unemployment, high inflation, high emigration. Only pay rates and general expectations for the future were low. As Gay Byrne used to put it, the country was "banjaxed".
However, there was a sense that everyone was in the same position - there was plenty of suffering but at least it was being shared, people believed - and they would have been angry if they had thought that this was not the case.
But Traynor was the answer to their troubles. As John Byrne, the developer who gave Dubliners the landmark O'Connell Bridge House, noted when Traynor and his sidekick, accountant Jack Stakelum, came to do the books of the Brandon Hotel in Tralee and flew through the job, staying up all night: "God, these are some characters."