The Public Accounts Committee's report on the scandal of DIRT evasion has been given a wintry reception by the usual suspects.
The banks, building societies, Revenue Commissioners and Central Bank have made their excuses (or promises) and left; AIB is consulting its lawyers while the Bank of Ireland is covered in embarrassment.
Dermot Quigley of the Revenue Commissioners came blinking into the light to speak for himself - pleased the committee had refused to believe AIB's claim of a tax amnesty, far from convincing when it came to the Commissioners' own affairs.
"Our follow-up wasn't the best," he admitted, but seemed to suggest that was because the extent of the problem wasn't known. (The commercial banks send out spokesmen more accustomed to being asked, and avoiding, questions. More adept, in some cases, at prompting diversionary lines of inquiry.)
The Central Bank promises to ask the commercial banks to report on tax compliance, once a year. It will also ask them to suggest a code of ethics - a voluntary code, which should have no one shaking in their shoes. None of this should take from the achievements of Jim Mitchell, Pat Rabbitte, Sean Ardagh and their colleagues, legal and political.
Banks, building societies and regulators may not like it but these representatives have done the rest of us some service, which is what they were asked by the Oireachtas to do. The results are clear, the challenges - for politics, as for finance - unmistakable.
Many had long suspected that, with the help of the banks and building societies, it was possible to hide taxable funds in bogus non-resident accounts. Well, here we have chapter and verse.
The text revives impressions of the hearings. For, thanks to TG4, we could watch the controllers of some of the most profitable, pompous and once respectable institutions in the State account for themselves.
Too often this meant pleading ignorance, blaming others, or coming down with the amnesia that has been rampant among the governing classes of late.
We heard how regulation didn't work and how all but a few of the public servants who were supposed to act in our interests thought better of it - for fear of a flight of capital for which there was no evidence.
We were permitted a glimpse of a world in which internal auditors were ignored when their reports didn't suit superiors and external auditors seemed to have it every way - paid, on one one hand, to audit a company's accounts and, on the other, to advise the same on how to chalk up profits.
It was as if the right hand wouldn't know what the left was up to or, because someone had a necklace of letters to his name, his judgment was regarded as beyond reproach or even question.
A lot of questions are asked here about institutions, practices and assumptions which no one dared question.
Some used to say that persistent, low-level corruption was part of what we are. Some still do, and profess admiration for the brazen, better-off criminals who have been robbing the country blind for years.
They even argue that the committee's report supports the claim that everyone is equally guilty because "everyone is at it". This is not so: some customers held up to 150 bogus accounts, perhaps more.
There's no knowing how many people were involved, but we can be reasonably sure, from the cases where evidence is available, that the numbers are not as great as some commentators would have us believe.
What the report has proved beyond doubt is the need for action by the Government and the Oireachtas on tougher regulation of financial institutions and greater use of parliamentary committees to see the job is being done.
The Government's first response has not been encouraging. Bertie Ahern speaks of a preference for "voluntary regulation", though it's clear, from this scandal and others, that self-regulation doesn't work.
It was left to the banks and building societies to ensure accounts were held only by people who really were non-resident. They didn't do it.
THE Government has had, for several months, a report prepared by Michael McDowell. It argues for a new financial regulatory authority. As Derek McDowell of Labour said on Thursday, the PAC report makes it more urgent that it should decide what to do, now.
But does Mr Ahern know where he or the Government stands? Derek McDowell quotes from the interview in which the Taoiseach argued against getting into "a regulatory framework which I do not think a country of Ireland's size can afford".
Then, as both John Bruton and Des O'Malley have pointed out, there's the case for a change in the relationship between government and Oireachtas, executive and parliament.
Most of the problems which have come to light in recent years have had their origins in the skewed relationship between a Government which refuses to make itself accountable to parliament and the accompanying obsession with secrecy.
The work of the Public Accounts Committee is a fine example of openness in action. It's also an example of the Oireachtas setting one of its committees to a task which might otherwise fall to a tribunal.
You may not now remember that one of the points made by Mr Justice Hamilton in the beef tribunal report was that if ministers had answered the questions they'd been asked, there would have been no need for a tribunal.
But ministers of all shades and civil servants regularly conspire in an effort to frustrate the opposition, and end up leaving the electorate confused, disillusioned and suspicious.
Even the Budget might have been less divisive - and not quite so messy - if it had been preceded by an open discussion about what Irish society really needs at the start of a new century.
e-mail: dwalsh@irish-times.ie