Shane Ross (Dublin South, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I will give her a flavour of it so that I can address the kinds of statements the authorised officer is making about what the Revenue and other State agencies did or did not do during this period of time.

He refers to "the failure of various Ministers of the Government and agencies of the State, including the Revenue Commissioners, to permit and/or conduct a full investigation of these matters" - the Ansbacher matters. He goes on to refer to the failure of State agencies "including the Revenue Commissioners, and that no effective action was taken by any of those agencies to pursue these matters". He refers to "a report being sent by the Minister to the Revenue Commissioners, the Garda Bureau of Fraud Investigation, the Office of the DCE and the Moriarty tribunal, and a second report being sent to the Revenue Commissioners by another Minister". He says, "To the best of my knowledge little or no effective action has been taken by any of these agencies on foot of these reports. Furthermore the contents of these reports which deal with very significant tax evasion over a lengthy period, at the expense of the taxpayer, have never been made public".

The authorised officer goes on in the same vein - this contrasts with what Ms Feehily has told us today - to indicate there was a failure on the part of the agencies of the State that were made aware of this information, which included the Revenue Commissioners, to act upon it and it is grossly negligent. He speaks at length and quite eloquently at times about the termination of incomplete investigations of evidence of significant tax evasion.

This is something which I suppose the Committee of Public Accounts would not be dealing with unless it had come from such a significant source. As Ms Feehily knows, it comes from a senior official in the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation - someone with whom the Revenue Commissioners were familiar, with whom they did a lot of business in the early period and to whom Ms Feehily has paid tribute in her submission to us today. What does she have to say about these staggering allegations against the Revenue Commissioners?