AS A boy growing up in the west of Ireland, the shadow of emigration darkened life everywhere, hovering like a vulture over its prey.

There were many scenes of whole families travelling to the train station. The mother blind with tears. The father's eyes dry, but his heart breaking. The young people leaving, leaning from the train window, choking with sadness as they looked at their parents for perhaps the last time.

Sometimes, white handkerchiefs were produced and waved until the train disappeared. Those handkerchiefs gave a ritual, almost sacramental solemnity to the goodbyes. Their presence was a symbol of defeat, a scathing indictment of an economy unable to provide for its brightest and most talented.

For me, it was an early education as to how our economic and political systems divide our people into winners and losers.

Memories of such scenes returned to haunt me in recent months, on reading reports of allegations that form the heart of investigations into payments to politicians by Ben Dunne.

This unsavoury saga offers us a relentlessly well polished looking glass, positioned at an uncomfortably dose angle, to show us something of the relationship between business and politics in Ireland. What it reflects is a deeply disturbing vision of our country.

Amid the allegations of money swirling around, surely it is scandalous that hundreds of thousands of Irish people continue to live in poverty. To date the political community has shown insufficient practical concern about this blot on our humanity. How can we so passively accept the fact that one third of our society is inevitably excluded from the process of personal, social, cultural, political, and economic development and public decision making?

Earlier this year, Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt's gripping autobiographical account of childhood poverty in Limerick, won the Pulitzer Prize. Possibly the most haunting image in that book is where the young Frank is shocked to discover his mother begging outside a church. Few scenes in the book expose the dehumanising quality of poverty better.

POVERTY is endemic in Irish society. But perhaps the most serious sort of poverty in the country is the poverty of leadership. Keeping aloof ultimately involves complicity. The payments to politicians controversy exposes the total inadequacy of what passes for analysis concerning ethics in politics in Ireland.

If we are to do justice to this issue we must approach it with a much wider lens than we have to date.

An alien from outer space, visiting Ireland at any time this past 20, years, could be excused for thinking there were only three moral questions in this country - abortion, contraception, and divorce. It is extraordinary that a place with such a rich intellectual tradition, and where religion has been so pervasive, has such an impoverished public ethical discourse.

As a nation, we must at last begin to face up to the question - what kind of society do we want to live in?

The use of the word "morality", in an Irish context, itself needs clarification. A small example illustrates this. Very occasionally our politicians are allowed to act like adults and are given a free vote in the Dail on a so called "matter of conscience", such as the vote on contraception, for instance. Yet perhaps, in ethical terms, the most significant piece of legislation each year is the Budget. It impacts fundamentally on people's standard of living.

How many Irish people, let alone politicians, think of the government's provisions for health and education funding, social welfare entitlements, and donations to the developing world, as ethical issues?

The challenge for us today is to formulate a new vision of the economic order which does justice to the interests of all. A central feature of this vision must involve the articulation of a new approach to profit, one which allots business people to obtain a just reward for their initiative and effort, but which also sees profit as a means to an end rather than as Jan end in itself.

THERE ARE also huge unaddressed ethical questions about the way power is distributed in Irish society.

To what extent does our education system serve to perpetuate social stratification? Do our banks and professions exercise their power in an ethically responsible way? In the run up to the Maastricht referendum in 1992, the buzz phrase was "the democratic deficit" - the belief that so called ordinary people were denied access to the political process.

Is there a similar deficit in terms of having views aired in the media?

Who decides which opinions and stories deserve to be reported, and using what criteria?

The payment to politicians controversy has also highlighted another lacuna. In public life truth often seems to mean simply telling only what it is technically possible to get away with. Have some of our institutions and politicians forgotten that it is possible to present the correct facts and yet be guilty of deception by what is concealed? In a number of recent cases of public concern, information has been drip fed with the tardiness of a frightened child going to the dentist.

Over recent years the proliferation of scandals in Irish life has provoked widespread concern. Such scandals did not occur in a vacuum, but are symptoms of a deeper malaise. An economic and political system which causes such unsavoury practices to develop in the first place must be reformed.

Shortly after he was made Taoiseach, Charles Haughey said that "as a nation, we have been living beyond our means". The recent welter of allegations suggests that, in many respects, as a nation we have been living with our heads in the sand. Hopefully, it will serve as a awake up call to us all to confront the thorny ethical questions we have avoided so successfully for so long.