Seems stealing is part of the elite’s culture

The tracker mortgage racket makes some of us wonder if it’s time we turned crooked, writes Gene Kerrigan

AFTER decades of obeying the law, paying taxes without dodging or complaining, I’ve begun to wonder if I’ve been a mug.

Like most people, I’ve never stolen. Like most people, that wasn’t because I feared being caught. It came from a belief that society should be lawful and orderly.

Maybe they’re right, though — the people who run this country. Maybe thieving is the way to go.

Anyone looking at how the tracker mortgage racket is being handled can be in no doubt of the message from this Government: losers obey the law, winners do whatever they can get away with.

This goes against a code many of us were raised to believe. Personally, I was raised by Catholics who took seriously the command to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. It wasn’t just a well-constructed sentence, it was a way of life.

In my youth, some of my neighbourhood friends were socialists. They’d no quibble with adopting that same Christian ethic of good citizenship. They added their own: “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.”

Today, the people who preside over our society see such ethics as quaint relics of a naive age. And maybe they’re right. Bankers took money from more than 30,000 people. Some victims went through dreadful horrors, lost their homes — only those people know what the strain did to relationships, the sleepless nights and the health problems.

It wasn’t an accident, it wasn’t a mistake — it was as deliberate as picking pockets, but far, far more lucrative.

Last week, Paschal Donohoe had the bankers in to “admonish” them for being too slow with “compensation”.

They say they might pay some compensation by Christmas.

He says he’s disappointed in them, and what they did was disgraceful and unacceptable, words that mean nothing.

This is how ministers deal with problems, these days — with meaningful words that in their mouths lose all meaning. When he was minister for health, Mr Varadkar said the hospital chaos was “unacceptable”. Then he got out of the job as fast as possible, without fixing the unacceptable problem.

Housing Minister Eoghan Murphy finds the increase in homelessness “unacceptable”, and he tinkers with yet more futile private sector incentives, counting the days until he can move on to better things.

In the tracker mortgage scam, though, from the Taoiseach down our political and moral guardians are explicit: the law has no role here, the bankers will do what they feel they can get away with, on a schedule of their own making.

What would it take to bring the cops into the banks? If they started forging money?

There’s a knock on your door and it’s the guards telling you they’ve found your stolen car.

Great, you say, I’ll go down tomorrow and pick it up.

Not so fast, say the guards. We’re negotiating with the guys who took it. They say they’ll have it back to you by Christmas, or maybe next summer. You say, that’s terrible. The guards say, yes, we told them it’s unacceptable.

You ask, can’t you just arrest them?

And the guards say, ah, now, you can’t go blaming individuals — it’s the culture, you see. Stealing cars, it’s the culture. Ah, come on, says you. We’ve told them, say the guards, that we’re quite disappointed in them. And what they did say? They’ve said to tell you, “Screw you, sucker”.

The thing is, this tracker mortgage racket isn’t an isolated case. All my life I’ve had the “law and order” rhetoric from the Varadkar types. Meanwhile, the comfortable classes were organising one criminal adventure after another.

In 1988 there was a “tax amnesty”, to allow tax fraudsters to launder their dirty money. It brought to light half-a-billion in dodgy accounts — huge money now, massive in 1988.

The amnesty was to be the last chance for these people to bring their hot money into the straight economy.

So, of course, there was another tax amnesty in 1993, another chance to launder the dirty money.

That one revealed the State writing off £1.3bn, to the benefit of the tax evaders.

We don’t even know the extent of the tax evasion organised within the higher reaches of the great and the good. The Ansbacher racket became famous because Charlie Haughey was a leading crook in that affair, but there were lots of other schemes that were never disclosed — some of them openly discussed in the plushest of offices, where the “people who get up early” decided how much or how little tax they’d pay.

Then there was the DIRT tax racket, in which thousands of hoteliers, publicans, pillars of the community, captains of industry stole hand over fist.

The political parties were at it, too. Remember “pickme-ups”? No, you’re too young. Fianna Fail and Fine Gael would run up huge printing and transport bills, all kinds of expenses — and their patrons in business would pay the bills. The payments would be credited for services to those businesses. And, as business expenses, they were written off against the firms’ tax bill. Some of the crooks even claimed back VAT, to get another bite at the cherry.

We won’t even bother talking about the NIB racket or the various AIB rackets, you’ll have heard of the Beef Tribunal, Moriarty and the Planning Tribunal, but you probably don’t know about insurance “churning”, the offshore rackets or the non-resident account scams.

Between the various rackets, the underground economy in which the comfortable classes revelled siphoned hundreds of millions out of the real economy.

The economy was depressed. To save money in the 1980s, the Fine Gael/Labour government closed 985 hospital beds. Fianna Fail pretended to give a damn, as the queues got longer, and the beds were replaced by trolleys.

Fianna Fail won the next election, denouncing the bed closures — and then closed a further 6,377 hospital beds. We’re still feeling the effects today.

So, the tracker mortgage racket is just one more step in a long history of organised crime indulged in by the comfortable classes, and tolerated by the major parties. And, sure, God help them, it’s never their fault, it just part of their culture.

Of course, there was always a reason why the cops shouldn’t or couldn’t crack down on these crime waves. Usually they were too busy blowing into little machines to inflate the breath test figures.

Often, though, there was a gap in the law, or a loophole — shucks, we don’t know how that got there.

It got there because the loopholes were arranged when the legislation was being drawn up in consultation with the lobbyists from the comfortable classes.

So, some of us are not terribly impressed when Leo Varadkar gets out his props and poses for the cameras, lecturing us about the social welfare “cheats”.

He smears all pensioners and the unemployed and the disabled as potential chancers who have to be carefully policed in case they take an opportunity to steal. But he knows that social welfare cheating is minuscule compared to the continuing white collar rackets.

I’ll think it over, but it’s a bit late in the day to take to a life of crime. And I wouldn’t want to lower my ethical standards to those of Fine Gael and Fianna Fail.

‘All my life I’ve had law and order rhetoric from the Varadkar types’ ‘The people who preside over society see such ethics as quaint relics of a naive age’