My house in London came with a satellite dish, a thing I would not normally be interested in possessing. To my surprise, I am able to receive RTE Ra dio 1 on my television set, as clear as in Dublin 4. At first I thought I could get up in the morning, switch on Morning Ireland and continue believing I was at home, but perspective has nothing to do with the quality of reception.
At no time during the past week, listening from London to David Hanly and Richard Crowley talking to Michael Noonan, Mary Harney or Bertie Ahern, did I have any sense that the ongoing tribunal circus, on which the quality of Irish public life is alleged to depend, was anything other than a high farce in a somewhat distant State.
Would the PDs pull out of Government? Would the State be "plunged" into a general election? I didn't care. Perhaps my not caring was to do with my personal boredom threshold after many years listening to the same old nonsense? Perhaps, since I am much more likely to have a vote in the next British general election than the next Irish general election, I had the beginning of a sense that my stake had been surrendered?
Yes and no. Such elements were present, but they were not dominant. My overwhelming sense was of what an enormous scam it all was. The tribunal culture is a business based on the creation, promotion and sale of gossip. It may or may not bring down governments, but it will make no difference. It is the music in the game of musical chairs. That is all.
I heard the leader of the Party of Principle, Mary Harney, explaining why she will not bring down the Government of which she is deputy leader. "As of now, we have no reason not to believe the Taoiseach," she said; in other words, they are waiting for conclusive proof before pulling the plug. Those of us, however, with the irritating capacity to remember can recall several occasions in the past when the Party of Principle did not wait to acquire proof of wrongdoing before pulling the plug.
On those occasions, the Party of Principle laid much store on the necessity of "restoring public confidence in the integrity of the political system". On those occasions, the Party of Principle was then motivated by deep antagonism against particular individuals, and this element is not present on this occasion. Moreover, the Party of Principle stands to be wiped out in the next election.
Even more pertinent is the fact that the next election, whenever it is fought, will be fought by all parties using funds which have been acquired in the same manner as those transactions which the Moriarty tribunal is now seeking to "investigate". All parties depend on donations from "admirers" and indulge those who support them.
All parties are beholden to the sector of Irish society with the deepest pockets. To pretend otherwise is ludicrous.
Moreover, the newspapers and broadcasting organisations which re port on these proceedings are just as much at the whim of corporate favour, albeit mostly in the form of advertising revenue, as politicians. That is why they must pretend there is a line somewhere which has been breached on this occasion, while avoiding any deep scrutiny of the core questions.
Such distinctions, however retroactive, are necessary in the interests of preserving the integrity of the product which is now on sale to the Irish people: the illusion that Irish society is run, or was at some time intended to be run, according to elevated principles. Everybody knows that money makes the world go round. The purpose of pretending that it doesn't, oddly enough, is to make more money.
Nothing has changed in Irish society or politics as a result of these protracted investigations. Each election, the same politicians change places with one another. Those who have been under a cloud spend a short term in the political sin-bin before re-entering the pitch. In the past decade, every one of the five main parties in the State has been in government for at least one extended period: so, if politicians wished to reform, for example, the planning system, they could do so with the minimum of delay.
Only two politicians implicated in these events have left office: one was to retire anyway, the other resigned in a fit of pique. It is not possible to trace one single beneficial development to any of the four massively expensive tribunals which have dominated Irish political life in this decade.
Tribunals, however, are essential to the survival of politics, not because of the requirement to restore truth and principle to public life, but because there is now nothing else for politics to be concerned about. Globalisation, European unity and the death of left-right ideology have ensured that politicians have no differences about the issues politics is supposed to be about. They therefore need material to present themselves before the public, just as a singer needs songs or a juggler needs balls.
Likewise, Irish newspapers, having rowed in with the consensus on every important question, must find something to entice people to hand hard currency across the newsagent's counter. Scrutiny of "matters of public interest", such as those before the various tribunals, may have a much more elevated-sounding sense of importance than trivia about soap stars, but in essence it, too, is just gossip.
In any society or community, gossip fulfils a very useful function. When we gossip, as the German writer Alexander Mitscherlich has observed, we are concerned "not so much with the facts as with the effects that they arouse in us; we are concerned with the gaining, not of knowledge, but of pleasure". Gossip is, he added, a hook on which to hang all our "unpleasure".
THUS, when Padraig Flynn goes on the Late Late to boast about his three houses, we imagine we are outraged by his brass neck, while in fact we are titillated by our envy and sense of outrage against someone who is a source of annoyance to us. He allows us to feel superior, even if only in our relative deprivation. Gossiping, Mitscherlich concludes, is a way of "gaining enjoyment for one's pride for which there are no opportunities in actuality".
Tribunals, therefore, are a kind of political pornography, which allow us to work off all our pent-up feelings of outrage, curiosity, envy and spite, without having to engage in any meaningful way with what is happening around us. That is why voters rarely if ever take them into account when placing marks on ballot papers.
In previous eras, the appetite for gossip was satisfied at the parish pump; today, in our increasingly atomised society, there is no longer the intimacy at local level to provide the kind of common knowledge off which gossip feeds.
Thus, we depend on the media for a constant fund of sensation and surprise, and politicians, celebrities and other public figures have become as ciphers in the dramas which allow us all to live by proxy. The question is: will Mr Gilmartin spoil the cosy little circus? I hope so.