On the first day of hearings, senior Department of Finance officials blamed politicians for not wanting to pursue bogus non-resident accounts. On the second, the governor of the Central Bank - himself a former department official - washed his hands of any responsibility in policing non-resident accounts, saying that was the Revenue's job. Today, the Revenue Commissioners will start to account for their actions.
The Central Bank, which regulates the financial sector, had no mandate to examine bank accounts and was right not to get involved in cleaning up the situation, according to Mr Maurice O'Connell.
He plainly told the Oireachtas Committee DIRT inquiry the Central Bank did not get involved in policing this area and dismissed as "preposterous" suggestions that it had failed to do its job.
Mr O'Connell said the issue of bogus non-resident accounts was a taxation matter and fell outside of the responsibilities of the Central Bank. "We were right" not to investigate the issue, he said yesterday. "We stayed out of it. We did our job." Any interference by the Central Bank would have "cut across" the role of the Revenue Commissioners, he said. During lengthy questioning, Mr O'Connell insisted the committee had a "fundamental misconception" of what the Central Bank did. The committee repeatedly tried to pin the governor to acknowledge the Central Bank shared some of the responsibility for policing non-resident accounts.
As the regulator, was it not responsible for the maintenance of high standards in the financial sector? Could it not have requested a detailed breakdown of the number of non-resident accounts held in each county from the banks? Did it not get suspicious when in 1987 AIB informed the bank that some £600 million of its non-resident accounts should be "reclassified"?
Mr O'Connell explained the bank's primary function was prudential - to ensure the Irish financial institutions remained sol vent. It had no powers to inspect individual bank accounts and as such saw no reason to request more detailed information from the banks on the subject. The nub of the problem was the accounts had been opened based on "false declarations on a form to which we had no access", he said.
Clearly frustrated by Mr O'Connell's stance, committee member Mr Sean Ardagh TD asked was it fair to assume then the financial institutions themselves were actually regulating the Central Bank.
At the end of Mr O'Connell's contribution, more than one committee members admitted they still weren't any wiser as to what the Central Bank actually did.
The politicians were clearly annoyed that former civil servants had earlier laid the blame for years of inaction on bogus non-resident accounts with their party colleagues. The committee members made a number of references to the allegations during the day.
In the early session, the committee managed to establish that despite repeated warnings from senior civil servants over the years that any move to curb the abuse of non-resident accounts would trigger a flight of capital, there was no statistical basis for that dire prediction. Such warnings had, according to the committee, influenced the decisions of politicians.
The current secretary general of the Department of Finance, Mr Paddy Mullarkey, gave no insight into why the Department believed any exodus of cash would be so substantial as to undermine the currency, apart from alluding to a number of working groups established by governments to look at the issue at various times.
In his evidence on Tuesday, the chief executive officer of the National Treasury Management Agency, Mr Michael Somers, and a former senior official at the Department of Finance, said he believed any flight of capital would have been fairly modest - the only official to submit this view.
The committee also tried to tease out what undertakings AIB had received from Mr Ray Mac Sharry in 1987 when he was Minister for Finance in relation to the inspection of documents relating to non-resident accounts.
At a meeting with the Irish Bankers' Federation in May 1987, AIB reports the Minister as saying "that inspectability will not be an issue at any time and provision will be made in the 1988 Finance Act to cater for this".
Department of Finance second secretary, Mr Michael Tutty, who attended that meeting, insisted the Minister offered no such assurance and no change was made in any subsequent budget. As no inspections were subsequently carried out by the Revenue, the committee concluded that whichever account was accurate, AIB's understanding was what had happened. Today the Revenue will be asked to explain why.