'Moral defects' of society underpin crisis

CLEAR EVIDENCE of gross political incompetence in economic governance highlighted the need for a radical reform of the political system, Dr Garret FitzGerald has said. In a speech officially opening the MacGill Summer School at Glenties, Co Donegal, the former taoiseach also cited “widespread tax evasion” in the Republic.

“Our people have shown considerable tolerance of actual financial corruption – enthusiastically re-electing some of the minority of politicians known to be, or widely accepted as having been, financially corrupt,” he said.

Underlying the crisis were moral defects in Irish society and deficiencies in the quality and effectiveness of the political system, Dr FitzGerald said.

In the past decade, politicians either failed to observe that the economy was being “driven on to the rocks”, or “simply lacked the guts to shout stop”.

“Commitment to the common good of the Irish people as a whole has all too often been undermined by the intense localism of our society.” There was in Ireland a primordial attachment to a county or even to a small part thereof that seems to be given precedence over loyalty to the State.

This extreme localism led to a situation where cabinet ministers were seen, by many, “primarily as representatives of a constituency”.

“A particular manifestation of this is the way in which after the announcement of a new government the media reports which constituencies have ‘got a Mercedes’,” Dr FitzGerald said.

He had come across this “state car” complex also in Kazakhstan and Zambia and some of his experiences in the developing world had led him to see the localism in this country “as a native Irish form of African tribalism”.

Dr FitzGerald said Irish society had been “morally damaged by the quite extraordinary scale of tax evasion in recent decades by the self-employed, including many professional people”.

Taxation was seen as an unjustified levy, “imposed by a tyrannical regime for whose presence in power we, despite being the electorate, accept no responsibility”. As a result, “extra revenue has to be raised by taxes on spending, which shifts the burden away from the better-off”. Tax evasion, he said, had never received the attention it should from the church, who offer moral guidance to people every week.