It would be much easier, in today's column, to address the Public Accounts Committee as an entity. That approach would allow me to forget the comments I made to Jim Mitchell when, in 1997, he agreed to stay in politics, rather than leave, as he had announced was his plan.
To reverse his decision, I told him, meant he needed his head examined. It would be a long time before he could hope to be back in Government, and even then, he could not assume a Cabinet position would be his, given that his truthful public observations about John Bruton's low point on the charisma scale must still rankle with the leader. Jim Mitchell's good years in politics, I thought, were in the past. As it turned out, the past was prologue to an astonishing performance before, during and after the Public Accounts Committee hearings. Not only did Mitchell manage to do some splendid interrogation during the hearings, he managed to do even more splendid work with journalists in the last few days. Watching him, and listening to him correct small mistakes, left the impression of a fine memory in action. But Mitchell was also showing judgment and an apparently effortless overall grasp of what the committee had achieved.
That an opportunity was presented to Mitchell to present this businesslike excellence is yet another demonstration of the wonderful capacity of politics to surprise. Discovering that a Dail committee can be so professional has been a revelation to the public. We never thought they had it in them. Now we know that for a fraction of the cost, and a fraction of the time, they can achieve more than some of the tribunals. Of course, such a comparison is unfair. The Flood tribunal, for example, is chaired by a judge and has on all sides the very best legal teams available, whereas the PAC was chaired by one of that discredited breed, a politician, and had relatively little in the way of lawyers in action. The exception, of course, was the intellectual grace under pressure shown by Dermot Gleeson when Tony Spollen, that most respectable of former internal auditors, suddenly reached the point of no return and delivered himself of a few sentences which impaled several AIB people and practices.
Gleeson's carefully deferential intervention was beautifully judged and might well have worked, had not Mr Spollen been pushed into becoming the most unexpected Vlad the Impaler of modern times.
The lack of overwhelming legal presence at the PAC hearings has to have been one of the factors in their successful outcome. The blunt, un-self-serving chairmanship was another. A third was the questioning abilities shown by the committee members. Sean Doherty is a very different man from the one the public remembers from 15 years ago, and proved it by the clarity and precision of his questioning. Sean Ardagh, in the transcripts, seems confused and imprecise, until you realise how damning are some of the answers he got from some of those giving evidence. Some thought Pat Rabbitte was a disappointment. There was little room for his normal sharp-witted remarks.
The hearings also showed the inefficacy of much expensive spin-doctoring. Several of the banks arrived with initial statements carefully crafted to position themselves somewhere between the first and second rank of archangels.
It was obvious that PR agencies had burned their PCs at both ends for several nights crafting these statements, and it was equally obvious they should have stayed in bed. I'm beginning to believe most PR people don't live in the real world, but in one of their own invention, where "getting out a strong statement" and "pre-empting the questions" are "good moves".
Good moves without end results are pointless, and the initial statement syndrome was an almost complete waste of time in terms of end results. Neither the committee nor media paid a blind bit of attention to the self-serving waffle presented. (Indeed, the only time the media united in praising a bank, it was because the bank did the opposite: came out saying "We're not sure how much of it we did, but if we did any of it we shouldn't have, we're sorry, and we'll make it right.")
Even after the PAC published its report, PR professionals continued to find feet to place in mouths. David Holden, on behalf of Bank of Ireland, issued a statement which seemed to suggest that B of I wasn't the worst. Now there's a unique selling proposition. Can you imagine an airline selling its services on that basis? Reading the PAC report, I was struck by the level of genuine misunderstanding, in places, between people giving evidence and the people eliciting that evidence. One of the areas where there seemed to be no meeting of minds was corporate governance and the actual functioning of a board and of an audit committee. The PAC clearly sees a board as much more interventionist than most board members would find appropriate. The general view of the role of a board is that it decides policy and then lets management manage.
The report shows that where people giving evidence presented that kind of view, it was treated as unreasonable by the committee. This point is worthy of more discussion, as is the proper role and function of an audit committee.
In the immediate future, however, the PAC has created a mildly rising tide that lifts all politicians, and every public representative should feel grateful to every one of the committee for the credibility they have brought to politics and to politicians. While I doubt that the idea about dormant accounts can be made to fly, it's nonetheless a creative thought, and the disgraced banks would be unwise to get on any high horse about it. I have an even more creative thought, which may have particular appeal to AIB, since it now has its image around its ankles. The ultimate PR coup, I suggest, would be for AIB to give one of its People of the Year Awards to Tony Spollen.