GUNS will make us powerful: butter will only make us fat, said Goering, which just shows how much has changed in the economics of the modern world. Guns and butter are these days synonymous. Only the Chinese seem capable of organising a society in which the working class and peasants remain butterless while the state possesses vast arsenals of guns to keep them that way.
Everywhere else, where there are state guns, there has also to be butter for the soldiers and the soldiers' families. Butter is one means of keeping order among the citizenry guns the other when butter alone fails, especially in Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
And the two states on the western edge of Europe have shown themselves to be particularly adept at selling to Iraq. This state is one of them. We make grass, and when that grass is fully grown it is called beef. The British have arms factories, and they have the Scott report and we have our Beef Tribunal. Same thing. We are doomed, it seems, to remain locked in this mirror dance through history. Even our attempts to be different end up in the comparable gavottes through comparable courts, making yet more barristers rich, producing more and more incomprehensible tomes, with similar veins of perjury, seaming through the proceedings of each. And both the Hamilton report and the Scott report had limited consequences for the same reason: a fear that they could damage the peace process.
Secret Deals
Who can say which is what from what follows? Deals with Iraq, governments' guidelines changed, ministers found to be withholding information from elected representatives, discrepancies between export controls and government policy, breaches of public trust, secret business deals behind closed doors calls for resignations and sackings, assurances that all questions have been properly answered, assertions that they remain unanswered and, most of all, assertions by government which are simply unrecognisable from the reports on which those assertions were allegedly based.
The above allegations were drawn at random from the responses to both the Scott inquiry and the Hamilton inquiry. They are indistinguishable. All that needs to be changed in the reports is beef for machinegools, Matrix Churchill for Goodman International, Parliament for Dail. Otherwise, both investigations are identical, revealing within, government an odious disregard for the law, a happy appetite for the cover up and a blithe disregard for the truth.
Incidentally, both investigations were provoked by the British media, because the courtculture which infests public life in Ireland has made it virtually impossible for an Irish newspaper to tackle major issues of public importance without being confronted by a battery of solicitors' letters and threats of litigation.
It not entirely a negative picture. I suspect that these scandals belong to anglophone traditions of parliamentary government - that inquiries which unearthed so much of the scandalous material would never be held in other political cultures. The Danes, the Greeks, the Italians, the Spaniards - all have had their EC scandals, golcondas of money acquired illegally, and all have either hushed them up or, as in the case of the Greeks, almost boasted of their dexterity over that which is not theirs.
Daunting Prospect
But we have much to be concerned about. We face the daunting prospect later this month of having to fork out up to £100 million in EU fines on account of the activities of Goodman International and other beef companies, though that is nothing compared to the price the Marsh Arabs and the Kurds were made to pay by a regime fed by us and armed by the British and others (who are not, I note, conducting public inquiries into how they traded with one of the most evil regimes in the world). This most certainly is not a time for national sanctimoniousness on either side of the Irish Sea.
But questions do need to be asked about the formulation of State policy and the role of commercial interests in that formulation. It is quite clear now that this State's priorities towards our exports to Iraq were indistinguishable from those of the individual companies actually doing the trading. Inasmuch as the Scott report is comprehensible from newspaper reports, much the same, seems to be true in Britain. State and companies broke the rules, in concert.
Now, of course, we all want prosperity, and we want handsome profits for our exporting companies, and we all yearn to cave the treasuries of the Middle East tilted so that their contents spread over the creameries and the meatpackers of the Golden Vale and the lushness of Meath. Equally, with identical moral elevation, or lack of it, the British want to sell their airplanes and their missiles to spread the largesse of the Gulf and Indonesia to the arms factories of the northeast of England and to the working class housing estates that surround them. The principles involved are indistinguishable.
"Disgraceful Alliances
But our common desperation for growth, and our common traditions of the common law, mean that unwholesome, possibly disgraceful alliances are forged between state and exporter and are then, through those shared processes of common law and judicial inquiry, brought out into the open. The instincts to grow fat are matched by laudable instincts to tell the truth and this brings us to a third aspect of this shared and inglorious yet glorious tradition. It is that elected politicians then ignore the most seriously critical findings of the inquiries and brazen out the lesser ones and are able to do so by yet another shared tradition of the party whip converting the elected representatives of the people into trained poodles trotting ta-wards or nil-wards, yea-wards or nay-wards, whenever bidden.
And in that docile biddability rests one of the major threats to decent democracy in Ireland and Britain. Hamilton should have toppled one government. Scott another, and virtually nobody is asking why they did not.