Thinking up suitable punishments for Charles J. Haughey has become a national pastime. I met a man recently who thought the best way of dealing with the former Taoiseach was to make him live out the rest of his life in a two-bedroom, semi-detached council house. It was on the tip of my tongue to ask him if he thought Mr Haughey should be entitled to a medical card, but something about the quiver of his jaw told me that such jokes would not be regarded as matching the height of his dudgeon.
Had I come of an informing breed, I would have immediately reported this man to the Revenue Commissioners, on the grounds that his annoyance about Mr Haughey's questionable activities seemed to present a prima facie case that he had one or two fiscal secrets of his own. Accusation, as is recognised in psycho-therapeutic circles, is just another form of confession.
The great difficulty with attempting to analyse the subtexts of these events in any even-handed, wide-frame, compassionate and therefore truthful manner, is that it will be assumed by those who wish public perceptions to remain as they are that such explorations arise from a simple desire to get the present accused off the hook.
I have long since known that there is no point in trying to undermine such perspectives, since they exist in the first place as an alternative to thinking; and, since any initiative to deconstruct them would invite at least a modicum of thought, it is clear that all such efforts are utterly pointless. However, I would like to point out one or two of the ironies which will attend the appearance of Mr Haughey in court this week.
Mr Haughey stands accused of getting handouts from businessmen. The specific charge he faces this week is that, on being accused, he did not immediately confess. At the cultural level, there is the additional count that by allowing himself to become dependent on such largesse at a time when he was - as is inevitably added with great piety - "Taoiseach of this country", he brought his nation, office and people into disrepute.
I just think it should be recalled that when all this was occurring, it was the policy of this State to seek and obtain hand-outs from any consenting quarter, and this approach rarely met with anything but the maximum level of public approval. During the period when Mr Haughey is said to have had his hand in Ben Dunne's wallet, virtually the entire political discussion of the day was to do with cohesion and structural funding and the imperative to "draw down" as much of both as conceivably possible.
This policy was successful to the point where a good portion of our GDP in the 1990s has been obtained from such sources.
In truth, the greater part of Mr Haughey's job as Taoiseach involved the art of sticking his hand out, on behalf of this State and its citizens, in any direction wherein he imagined it might be crossed with any form of coin or currency. On this basis, it could be argued - as it is argued that Mr Haughey contributed to the "turnaround" in Irish economic fortunes by virtue of his "management of the public finances" - that his unique talent for begging was the true "secret" of the Celtic Tiger.
Let us be frank about Charlie. There is hardly a truthful adult alive in this country today who will not admit to having wondered at some time or other how it was he got to be so well-off, but only a few gave voice to their wonderment and nobody did anything. Most of us were happy to shrug it off with some vague notion of "shrewd investments" or woolly ideas about the astute riding of the rising tide. Charlie was the Fat Chieftain who, because he had so demonstrably catered to the needs of his own table, might enable some occasional scraps to stray in our direction.
In his few years in office, Charles Haughey created the foundations for a society forged in the image of his own housekeeping practice; an economy set in the quicksand of multinational capriciousness, buttressed by tax-dodging and pebble-dashed with EU funds.
For many years our economic administrators have operated a policy of enticement based on the use of low tax rates to tempt tax-avoiding multinationals in our direction. The most "attractive" aspects of Ireland's economy are its high tolerance of practices like tax dumping, transfer pricing, creative accountancy and fiscal blindness. Even as we set up tribunals to investigate the tax affairs of those who have created and operated this economy, we have been acquiring a worldwide reputation as the industrial equivalent of the Cayman Islands.
We have, moreover, been more than happy to live with such contradictions and have shown little of the capacity for truth-telling that we now demand from Mr Haughey. Although we now have the same sense of mystery and bemusement about our alleged collective good fortune as we once had about Mr Haughey's, we seem unwilling to follow the same logical route to reach the kind of conclusions about the national picture as we have arrived at about his.
National industrial policy is based on a series of scams which put Mr Haughey and all his works and pomps in the ha'penny place, yet we feel en titled to parade our virtue and deliver sanctimonious condemnations as though someone has dropped a used betting slip in the Garden of Eden. For those who are consumed with the present investigations and therefore looking forward to the spectacle of Mr Haughey in the dock this week, this might be a good time to read the script of Arthur Miller's wonderful play, The Crucible.
Act one of the published script of the play, based on the witch trials of Salem in 1692, is punctuated by occasional notes by the author about the social and spiritual context in which these terrible events occurred. "When one rises above the individual villainy displayed," Miller wrote, "one can only pity them all, just as we will be pitied one day . . .
"The witch-hunt was not . . . a mere repression. It was also, and as importantly, a long overdue opportunity for everyone so inclined to express publicly his guilt and sins, under the cover of accusations against the victims."
For the people of Salem in 1692, as with the people of Ireland in 1998, there was much beneath the surface sanctity and much above it that was other than it seemed. "Long-held hatreds of neighbours could now be openly expressed, and vengeance taken, despite the Bible's charitable injunctions. Land-lust which had been expressed before by constant bickering over boundaries and deeds, could now be elevated to the arena of morality; one could cry witch against one's neighbour and feel perfectly justified in the bargain.
"Old scores could be settled on a plane of heavenly combat between Lucifer and the Lord; suspicions and the envy of the miserable could and did burst out in the general revenge."
But far be it from me to spoil the party. Enjoy!