Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party)

For very many working people in this State, the revelations about massive fraud and tax evasion in the banking system and the air of injured innocence of the most senior people involved might come from a Monty Python script. A chief executive who had €40,000 invested for him with magnificently generous returns is giving the impression that the closest he ever came to hearing a word like "Faldor" might be in a Dubliners' song containing the words "with me right fal-de-o". The same chief executive claims he is an unknowing beneficiary of this structure, resulting in "the generation of an unexpected tax liability", while another senior executive had €33,000 invested in 1989 and, inexplicably, a few short years later it has grown to a massive €81,000, at which he professes amazement. This must be the banking sector's own phenomenon of immaculate conception — amazing things happen but nobody knows how.

How can the ordinary taxpayer have confidence that these crimes will be investigated when we have a Fianna Fáil-led Government and, while the banks were defrauding taxes, speculators were bribing top Fianna Fáil politicians and getting rotten rich on consequent rezoning, and the Taoiseach was writing blank cheques for Charvet shirts? The Tánaiste found her voice yesterday and called for Garda involvement years after the full revelation of much more serious tax evasion, racketeering by the banks. Is the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, perhaps as we speak, ordering a wing of Wheatfield Prison to be cleared to make way for senior executives of the banks suspected of serious tax evasion as he did around Mayday for young persons suspected of stealing a garda's cap? Perhaps he is sending water-cannon into the bank's boardrooms to flush out the truth about those who organised all this racketeering. The Taoiseach will not be surprised, or perhaps he will be, that ordinary working people are completely cynical regarding the willingness of the political establishment to investigate another powerful sector of the establishment and bring those guilty of fraud to justice.

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