This week saw the publication of the eagerly-awaited report of the Comptroller and Auditor General. According to John Purcell we have had the infamous three monkeys at work in this country since 1986.
The holders of the fraudulent offshore bank accounts could see no evil in lying to the banks about where they really resided. In turn the banks refused to hear any evil when they were told these lies. And the regulatory bodies wouldn't speak any evil about their convictions that the State was being cheated out of tax revenue.
At least £50 million never made it into the public coffers. That's a minimum of £10 that could have been spent on each man, woman and child in the country.
Normally getting caught in a chain of deception perpetrated against the people of the country would cause fairly profound embarrassment and a public relations disaster on a grand scale. Not this time. Not one of the participants seems to be genuinely upset over what happened.
I suppose we shouldn't be surprised about the lack of guilt. They've had years to work out their rationalisations.
Starting with the account-holders: "Sure all we did was lie to the banks about our addresses. That's not anything serious and some of us were actually encouraged to do so by the banks. C'mon, what we did was rogueish, puckish, maybe even a little naughty, but we're no criminals . . ."
And the bankers get to trot out an old, old excuse: "A few bad apples seem to have been involved but you can't blame us all for their actions. And anyway, the accountholders lied to us about their addresses and we can't be expected to go chasing up every last one of them, can we? It'd take for ever and we'd be forced to pass on the cost to the customers. At worst we were sloppy but we're no criminals . . ."
Fair dues to the regulators, at least they came up with a new line: "Well, we suspected that this was going on over a period of time but the situation wasn't really that straightforward.
"If we'd enforced the DIRT thoroughly we would have ended up scaring off investors. It would have been bad for the economy. Our decision was to plump for the lesser of two evils (there's that word again). We were in an impossible situation and what we did was for the good of the country but we're no criminals . . ."
Consciences salved all round. But these sophisms cut little ice with the public. So where has the PR disaster gone?
Clever spindoctoring and a co-ordinated damage limitation campaign? Hardly.
What they've done is accidentally stumble across two of the less publicised rules of public relations.
Number one: If you are going to get involved in a scandal make it a complex one with lots of co-conspirators. It is very difficult to sustain one's anger when there is a huge range of people to get annoyed with.
The scandal ends up becoming diffuse, the public outpourings inevitably lack focus. The "bad guy" is not readily identifiable because everyone seems to be equally culpable. We, the public, should be livid but we can't figure out who to point the finger at, and anyway we don't have enough fingers to point at all the guilty parties.
Number two: The big lie. Goebbels noted that one of the key principles of propaganda was that if you were going to tell a lie, make it as big a lie as possible. What he was getting at is that while people may dismiss the lie, they will often assume that there is some grain of truth at the heart of it, that the misinformation will be mostly rejected but not entirely.
What happened with the DIRT scandal was that these people were complicit in a pattern of misbehaviour for over a decade. By managing to keep the scam going for such an enormous length of time and on such a grand scale (remember at its peak this fraud may have involved £2 billion) the fraudsters gave their behaviour a patina of acceptability.
None of us was desperately surprised by the contents of the C&AG's report. We've got used to the idea that the very rich have ways and means of getting around taxes and that the banks are not the paragons of virtue they would have us believe.
And it is this acceptability that is the problem. Because it seeps. The idea that evading tax is not only not that serious a crime but that in some cases the regulators are willing to ignore it is poisonous. Poisonous because people will want to give it a shot themselves. "If they can get away with it, why can't I?"
That is the reason the regulators' explanation for their inaction is so wholly inadequate. Their job was to enforce the rules without fear or favour.
That's what democracy is all about, and to simply abandon it on the basis of a perceived external threat to our economy just isn't good enough. It was a short-term solution that inevitably created more problems than it solved.
Over the last few years our regulatory bodies have been given more and sharper teeth. The Government now has to ensure that those teeth get sunk into the right legs, that the Revenue Commissioners, the Central Bank and the Department of Finance go after all the fraudsters, chancers and con artists who are doing the rest of us out of what is rightfully ours.