No matter how often you encounter it or how much you think you've become used to it, one aspect of public life in Ireland never ceases to amaze. It is the ferocious defiance of the ruling class at bay. In most societies, powerful people or companies who get caught doing wrong tend to deal as quickly as possible with the source of the embarrassment, keep as quiet as possible about it and move on as quickly as possible.
Getting caught, at least, is understood to be shameful. The best thing to do is to mumble apologies, pay the damages and hope it will all be forgotten sooner or later.
Here, the instinctive reaction in such situations is to rage against the sheer injustice of the accusation, even when it has been proven true.
A good example of this in recent times was Allied Irish Banks' reaction when it was caught colluding with massive evasion of the DIRT tax system. To watch AIB witnesses at the Public Accounts Committee hearings was to see men (and a few women) barely able to suppress annoyance at what they clearly regarded as a hysterical campaign by politicians and the media.
Far from being shame-faced or apologetic, they stuck to the three interlocking all-purpose justifications that characterise these affairs: (a) even if we did it, it was only a little bit, (b) it was someone else's fault and (c) sure wasn't everyone at it? They brazened it out to the end of the hearings, and even in the face of the damning PAC report, there has been no apology, no offer of recompense, and an unshakeable insistence that they don't owe the taxpayer very much money.
Now that the Bank of Ireland has set a precedent with its settlement of £30.5 million with the Revenue, we can expect AIB to cough up vastly more than it insisted it owed. But we cannot expect an apology.
AN even more spectacular example of this phenomenon arose early last week concerning a court case in which the Department of Agriculture was trying to get Goodman International to cough up the value of beef misappropriated at its Rathkeale, Co Limerick, plant in the early 1990s.
The RTE news carried an item on the issue and asked Goodman for a statement. The statement it got was that "the organisation would vigorously defend itself" and that "the operations at Rathkeale were as good as, if not better than, industry standards". To understand the sheer, breathtaking cheek of this statement, you have to have a broad idea of what the "operations at Rathkeale" actually were.
It happens that we know a great deal about them from the beef tribunal and from subsequent court cases. While issues of legal liability in the particular action taken by the Department against Goodman were a matter for the court, there was no dispute about the facts.
The criminal courts have already found that serious crimes were committed at Rathkeale and sentenced two Goodman executives there to suspended prison terms for their parts in a conspiracy to defraud the Minister for Agriculture by misappropriating intervention beef. Those sentences were suspended by the trial judge, Mr Justice Moriarty, only because he took the view that the conspiracy was neither instigated by these men nor benefited them and that it must have been concocted at a higher level in the organisation.
Two connected frauds were at work. One, in the boning hall, involved the large-scale theft of intervention beef belonging to the European Union. Nearly £1 million worth of this beef, bought and paid for by the EU, was siphoned off by the company and sold for its own profit to its commercial customers.
The second, in the cannery, involved the replacement of the stolen intervention beef with another lot of intervention beef sent there to be canned as food aid to Russia, which was then in crisis. This meat, in turn, was replaced by poor-quality stuff, including offal, some of which had turned green. These green hearts were then sent to Russia with love. Larry Goodman denied all knowledge of these activities, and the beef tribunal found no evidence to contradict his denials.
When the criminal cases had been dealt with, Goodman International issued a statement saying that "if it is the case that if [sic] any individuals indulged in unacceptable activities in the group's plant in Rathkeale, Goodman International shall recompense the Department [of Agriculture] for the appropriate loss".
Yet, as the minister for agriculture at the time, Ivan Yates, told the Dail in 1997, when the Department went looking for the money, "I was very disappointed to find, when we pursued this matter of recovery, that we received a solicitor's letter stating that they would not pay it. This is why we have instituted legal proceedings". Thus the court case that occasioned last week's statement.
IS there any other kind of crime where it would be acceptable for those who benefited from it (albeit unwittingly) to calmly turn round and send the authorities a solicitor's letter telling them that they do not wish to hand over the loot? And then, when the issue is about to come to court, claim that all that had happened was no different from "industry norms"?
Yet it's this "industry norms" stuff, so reminiscent of AIB and other financial institutions at the PAC hearings, that helps to explain not just the behaviour of Goodman International in this case, but the general attitude that seems to be at work. You can see actually see a warped logic at work.
Everybody we know is at it. It's become the norm. So how come we're being mocked and persecuted? Some evil people with hidden agendas have singled us out and turned our "normal" behaviour into a crime. So they are the sinister ones and we are the victims. Like the Fianna Fail senator who recently compared Hugh O'Flaherty to Jesus Christ, any fair-minded person could see that we are being crucified.
Bizarre as it may seem, they actually come to believe this. And so long as the norm is what it is, they will go on believing it.