Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Is it not astonishing given how closely he worked with Revenue, that he comes across something at that point in time which he regards as very new, as very secret and a new ledger but the Revenue said it was not so new and not so secret? That is the central point in his submission. That is his interpretation. Even accepting that the Revenue has broader powers, that troubles me. The Revenue had this level of contact with this individual which, as Ms Feehily has indicated just now, was not just by way of official documentation and reports, but an interactive communication between officials and him. We are at the disadvantage of not having direct testimony from the official in question. It is half of a conversation.

It strikes me as very odd. Notwithstanding that it was a large number of cases, in relative terms it was a small sample of people and entities engaging in this practice. I would have thought that people working so intimately with these issues would have been very conversant with what was what and who was who. These people were consumed by the issue and tracking it. Broadly speaking, they would have had a shared analysis of the scope of it. For an official like him to pass that on in late 2003 or early 2004 and say this was new information, very secret and hitherto unknown at the point at which the Revenue says all of the case base was established and for the Revenue to say there was nothing new in it, jars with me. It strikes me as inconsistent and curious.