Marie Murray: No great mystery about Irish corruption

Actions either continue or cease depending on their consequences. In a country that provides risible token retribution for corruption, there are no real negative consequences for corrupt practices and there are often very substantial rewards. When ‘rewards’ become the norm for corruption a culture of corruption prevails.

The RTÉ revelations this week provide the most recent examples of malfeasance, which is endemic and systemic in our culture and which has not been tackled adequately despite a government whose ticket promised political and public reform. These latest additions to the chronology of misdeeds along a continuum from incompetence to corruption - obscene salaries, unjustifiable pension provisions, charitable donations and membership subscriptions used for executive incomes, problems in tendering, planning abuses, deceptions in declarations by omission and commission and comedic denial of inconvenient truths are not reassuring.

How do such practices continue? There are a number of hypotheses . One is that what is newsworthy remains so for too short a time. Nanosecond attention allows those who engage in misconduct to merely wait until the storm abates and the issue is replaced by new scandal. This accounts for the monotonous regularity with which malfeasance is uncovered - it is survived because of short memories and large gain.

A second hypothesis is that the sequelae to revelations become so entertaining that the real issues gets lost in the comedic exit strategies of denial, legal loopholes, outraged rhetoric, declarations of inadvertent error, episodes of acute amnesia, even allegations of being duped by media and state co-conspirators and investigative journalists engaged in personal vendetta. Kafkaesque delusions of stings and reverse stings call for reality checks as to whether one is tuned to a comedy channel, candid camera, news or news parody. In short the entertainment factor overwhelms the issue at hand.

A further hypothesis is that we are complicit in what occurs in the political arena because we vote for what benefits us personally rather than what is more abstractly beneficial to society at large. Therein lies the paradox: we cannot self-righteously demand abstractly high standards if we just vote for concrete personal reward. We get what we vote for if we accept, sequentially, palliative pre-election promises and do not call broken promises to true account.

Psychology identifies specifically people who see ‘creaming a little from the top’ as the norm; those who say if there is money to be made why shouldn’t I have some of the action; those who are opportunistic; those unable to resist temptation and those with the profile of entitlement, grandiosity, impaired empathy, manipulation and projection of blame on to others for their misdeeds. There will always be people who have disdain for law but who co-opt it with alacrity in their defence when caught red-handed.

In the simple laws of psychological behaviourism - the laws of positive and negative reinforcement - behaviour that is rewarded continues and behaviour that is not rewarded ends. Sanctioned behaviour is less likely to recur. Clear unambiguous rules with clear consequences and no reinforcement for practices that fall short of ethical standards eventually bring about change. We saw this with the smoking ban - the rules were clear, enforcement was immediate, consequences were costly, the project was successful.

The problem of corruption is solvable. Technology has already ensured that, for example, job applications are online, that sites cease at the application deadline, that specific questions are asked, that canvassing is prohibited. The more there is distance the less opportunism can occur. If there is political will, vigilant policing, watertight legislation, cultural distain for corruption and forensic investigation, cronyism and cute ‘hoorism’ will cease.

We know that there is compliance with what is policed. What is decreed and enforced works. So why is this simple solution not invoked? Where is the political will by those who promised reform? Why are promises broken and why do people put up with it?

We have accepted that revelations no longer shock us but the banality of misconduct still dismays. Because at the end of the day there is no profound psychology to corruption. Like the ‘banality of evil’, the banality of corruption is that it pays to cheat. What is not controlled continues. It is as simple, as salutary and as depressing as that.

Dr Marie Murray Consultant Clinical Psychologist @drmariemurray