It was, by any standards, an extraordinary business: an unlicensed bank being run, on the side, by the chairman of one of the biggest companies in the State.
Its 120 clients, using coded accounts to disguise their identities, included eight of the company's directors and some of those credited with designing and leading the State's industrial development.
They were taking advantage of a scheme designed with equal care to avoid detection by the Revenue Commissioners; a scheme to defraud the system of taxes due on funds running to hundreds of millions.
Yet what was most extraordinary about the affair was that the unlicensed bank's most prominent client had been both minister for justice and minister for finance; that he'd led the State's biggest party for 13 years and for more than seven years was head of government.
And the company chairman who'd designed the ingenious scheme was his friend and adviser, the manager of his financial affairs.
If all of this had happened in a warmer, poorer country Irish officials would have sighed and shrugged at the behaviour of a typical Third World leader and his cronies.
But this was a country bidding for a place in the first rank of the developed world, with long-established institutions and a highly-developed political system.
And one of the most bizarre features of the week's extraordinary events was the response of Charles Haughey's successors.
With the rest of the State reeling in disbelief or seething with anger, it didn't seem to strike them that they had any responsibility for the corruption or its consequences.
Bertie Ahern and Charlie McCreevy talked tough - about their determination to defeat the nurses. When they were asked about Ansbacher, they bumbled.
It was a terrible thing but it had happened long ago, when people were under pressure; there were laws against tax evasion and they should be applied.
Meanwhile, back at the Public Accounts Committee, whose hearings are broadcast daily on TG4, members continued to hear how the laws had not been applied when bogus non-resident accounts were used to evade an estimated £950 million or more in DIRT.
And at Dublin Castle, Mr Justice Flood heard of George Redmond's many bank accounts and investments which amounted to £660,000 in one year.
Mr Redmond, who used to be one of the most senior local authority officials in the State, couldn't for the life of him remember how he came by the money.
BUT that was only one of many mysteries in a week in which a line from Beckett's Happy Days ran like a chorus through the news: "What's it mean, he says. What's it meant to mean?"
It's a question that must have occurred to nurses as Mr Ahern and Mr McCreevy dodged Ansbacher and DIRT to attack them for not realising that if they got their increases a new national wage agreement - and social partnership - would be in jeopardy.
But, if Mr Ahern and Mr McCreevy were incoherent, the message from some of their allies was plain. "`Greedy' public sector could destroy boom, economists warn" was the headline in the Sunday Independent last week.
And, sure enough, there were two veterans of the Doheny and Nesbitt school, Colm McCarthy and Moore McDowell, rowing in behind Mr McCreevy's claim that, if anything goes wrong with the economy, it'll be the fault of the public sector.
This cuts both ways. It applies:
(a) to the people who provide public services.
(b) to those who enjoy or, through poverty, disability, age or ill health, are forced to rely on them.
Like Mr McCreevy and the rest of the Hi-de-Hi gang, the Doheny and Nesbitt economists adopt a superior air. "You won't get very many economists over the age of 15 to disagree with McCreevy," says Mr McCarthy. "Unions see [the] budget surplus as a pot of gold, but it's not," says Mr McDowell.
And, on radio on Thursday, Mr McDowell even managed to hold the public sector and the critics of Ansbacher responsible for the whole affair.
He was tired of "semi-hysterical expressions of outrage". It could turn into a witch hunt. "You cannot escape the consequences of something that is predictable. . . High taxes provoke evasion."
So, there you have it. The Ansbacher scandal was really the responsibility of politicians who favoured public spending on health, welfare, schools and employment schemes. Any 15-year-old could have told you.
No doubt we'll hear from the 15-year-olds. In the meantime, it might be well to refresh the public memory about what was said and done since the great PAYE marches of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Specifically, we should remember what conservative politicians, financial institutions and experts said about the demands for a fairer system. And what they did.
There would be a flight of capital, they said.
It didn't happen; and when they were asked at the Public Accounts Committee, none of the witnesses - from the Department of Finance, the Revenue Commissioners, the Central Bank or the retail banks - came up with a shred of evidence to show that it was feared.
There was no pot of gold, they said.
BUT there was, though it's only now that we are beginning to see the size of the contents; now that the lid is at last being lifted to show what the pot really held.
It couldn't be done, they said. You might as well ask the Pope for the third secret of Fatima as expect the elite in business and politics to open up.
Well, it can be done - if those we elect to represent our interests have the guts to insist.
There was no such pressure, or not enough of it, when Des Crowley wrote in the Evening Press about Mr Haughey's finances in the early 1980s.
Or when John FitzGerald, of the ESRI, spoke of tax evasion by way of non-resident accounts exactly 10 years ago, on September 28th, 1989.
Mr FitzGerald read a paper on tax reform and income distribution at a social policy discussion organised by CORI, the Conference of Religious of Ireland.
The introduction of DIRT, he said, was "accompanied by a sizeable increase in non-resident deposits in the Irish tax system probably arising from a desire [and an ability] to evade the tax by nominally shifting jurisdiction".
The warning was clear: people who wanted to evade tax could do so by nominally changing jurisdiction. And they did. But damn all was done to prevent it. Now, the evaders are trying to escape the consequences.
But, if you're wise you won't depend on the Government to see that they get their comeuppance.
Mr Ahern's efforts to exorcise Mr Haughey's ghost included a set of guidelines for the Cabinet covering the acceptance of gifts. Mr McCreevy and Ms Mary Harney decided to ignore them.
This week other guidelines were in the news when Noel Dempsey threatened the Bank of Ireland with action by the Central Bank for what he saw as a breach of that organisation's guidelines.
Except that there are no Central Bank guidelines governing loans to house-buyers.
Such regulations as there are have been introduced - and are implemented - by the lending agencies themselves.
And self-regulation, especially by the financial institutions, is like Sam Goldwyn's verbal promise: not worth the paper it's written on.