In the short run the Ansbacher accounts revelations certainly damage confidence in the integrity of commercial as well as public life. For it now appears that what many had for long believed to be a small Golden Circle of businessmen, linked to the leader of one political party and his agent, had in fact become a much wider group of business and perhaps professional people. The infection emanating from the top had spread much farther than any of us had imagined.
In the longer run, however, this exposure will certainly prove beneficial to our society. For if the rot had not been stopped at this stage, the balance within our commercial sector might have shifted so far towards the dishonest end of the spectrum that honest businessmen - who, happily, still remain the great majority - might have found it difficult to resist the temptation to join the minority who had put themselves above the law.
And in politics the tiny handful of politicians close to the top who had become involved in improper financial activities might eventually have grown in number to the point of undermining our democracy.
However, it is now possible that the effects of these revelations may go far beyond a long-overdue radical clean-up of a disreputable corner of our business and political life. For these events carry the possibility of a transformation of our political system, through a radical shift in the balance of the pressures to which it responds.
To understand how this might come about it is necessary to reflect briefly on how governments and oppositions actually relate to the electorate.
In my experience political parties do not think in terms of simply winning an amorphous majority of votes: instead they think in marginal terms. Starting with a solid core of loyal supporters upon whom they feel they can rely, they set out to win, at the margin, a proportion of new first-time voters, plus some floating voters from among that part of the electorate which at the last election had voted against them.
And, because the turn-out of new voters is known to be low, gaining the support of floating voters who previously supported other parties tends to loom largest in the minds of parties at election times.
Political parties do not, primarily, direct their policies towards winning the support of a majority of the electorate: rather do they seek power by appealing to two sets of minorities: the minority who voted for them last time but might be tempted to float elsewhere on this occasion, and a potentially floating minority among those who voted against them last time.
It is because these two minority groups, the primary target of political parties at election times, are small that governments become vulnerable to tiny pressure groups, where these are sufficiently single-minded about their interests to make the satisfaction of their demands the sole criterion of how they will vote.
Such single-interest groups may be either disinterested, pursuing some cause idealistically, or else self-interested, pursuing a private interest of their own. Bitter experience of the strength of self-interest among sections of the electorate has sometimes led political parties to be more concerned about the latter than the former.
So it is that, in the absence of any counterbalancing pressures, quite small single-interest groups can come to wield a totally disproportionate influence in democratic elections. And when general public opinion is fairly inert, such strongly-motivated groups can have things all their own way. Let me give some examples from my own experience.
In the mid-1970s a small annual wealth tax was substituted for death duties, on a basis that would approximately halve the burden of these capital taxes, the incidence of which had previously depended upon the chance of when deaths occurred in a family. The substitute tax (which could have been regarded as a kind of low-cost insurance against death duties) applied only to property other than a private residence that would exceed £500,000 in value today.
Only one-half of 1 per cent of the population was adversely affected by this change. The remainder either enjoyed a lower rate of capital taxation as a result of the change, or had insufficient property to be liable to any capital tax.
Yet this one-half per cent of rich taxpayers adversely affected were so skilful in the manner in which they attacked this new tax, persuading many who were benefiting from this relief that the new system would instead hit them hard, that the Fianna Fail opposition was persuaded to promise to abolish this tax, and in fact did so.
A similar fate befell the residential property tax. Although only 20,000 people with good incomes and substantial residences had to pay this (about 2 per cent of all taxpayers), this tiny lobby proved influential enough to persuade both government and opposition to agree not just to amend it to meet some reasonable criticisms, but to abolish it and transfer the burden of raising the lost tax to the hard-pressed general taxpayer.
In these cases the 9899.5 per cent of less-well-off taxpayers, who were ultimately the losers through the transfer of the burden of these taxes to their shoulders, were so inert that they exercised no counterbalancing political influence vis-a-vis the tiny group of better-off people to whom the political parties felt it necessary to defer.
Something similar operated in 1983 when, as Alan Dukes has explained, the government of the day found that pressure from financial interests on the opposition and on some government TDs made it impossible to complete the enactment of legislation that had been introduced to tighten up on tax evasion.
True, that same government subsequently sought to recover this lost ground by bringing in the DIRT system of deducting tax from interest on bank deposits held by residents, a move that certainly cost it the support of some elements in the 1987 election. But, of course, we now know that the enforcement of this new DIRT tax was subsequently aborted, in circumstances yet to be clarified, as a result of the issue of a Revenue Commissioners instruction not to inspect the certificates of non-residence.
News of this seems to have spread to some of the banks as they recruited staff from the commissioners, and this seems to have influenced the attitude of some bankers towards the deduction of this tax.
This imbalance of power as between tiny but powerful minorities, single-mindedly pursuing their private financial interests, and an inert majority of compliant taxpayers may, however, prove to have been undermined by recent events. If the anger of the exploited mass of ordinary taxpayers does not simply evaporate in a short-lived and futile burst of vengeance-seeking, but is sustained throughout the years ahead, politicians may in the future find their interests better served by legislating in the general interest rather than by allowing themselves to be pushed around by small groups of wealthy people.
That development could, of course, be greatly assisted if the recent process of reducing the dependence of both parties and individual politicians on contributions from the business community was to be brought to its logical conclusion: through the total abolition of this source of finance, substituting for it a proportionate increase in State support for political parties at election time.
If that was done, and if the arousal of public opinion against the abuse of democracy was to be sustained into the future, we could become in time one of the best-governed countries in Europe.
However, we must not become complacent about the radical change that has seemed to be taking place in public opinion over the past few weeks. The subversive voices of those who fundamentally reject the authority of our democratic State, and claim the right to decide for themselves whether or not to pay the taxes lawfully levied upon them, have not yet fallen silent. Let me quote the words of one unrepentant journalist writing last weekend, remembering that the tax she was writing about was levied at a rate of 20 per cent:
"Even within the ingeniously sadistic annals of taxation history DIRT must be one of the grubbiest, most mean-spirited little taxes ever devised, rightly striking fear and loathing into its victims . . . DIRT punished the prudent, by ruthlessly sluicing off the interest on their savings - and left the feckless wasters who squandered every penny on wine, women and song blissfully untouched . . .
"No wonder a few within Irish society sought ways to evade paying it. Why not? Hiding money in such circumstances is no more worthy of shame or blame than hiding a pearl necklace in the lining of your bloomers when Dick Turpin stops the stage-coach."
In these words we can hear the authentic voice of the ancien regime in France before the Revolution. "How dare anyone suggest that we, the nobility, should pay taxes? We have a right to decide for ourselves what taxes we will pay - and we don't intend to pay any. We will leave taxes to the bourgeoisie and the peasants."
So long as some journalists and their editors feel there is a market for this kind of subversive drivel, we will need to remain vigilant if we are to ensure that anti-democratic pressures no longer distort the management of our public affairs.