Fintan O'Toole Demented notions of patriotism

When Fianna Fáil is in a corner, it tends to reveal itself. An underlying, and perhaps unconscious, world view emerges. It can be summed up in three words: L'etat c'est nous - we are the State, writes Fintan O'Toole.

If the mystical mood is upon them, "the nation" can be substituted for "the State". The belief is rooted in history and ideology, in the sense of being the republican vanguard that really represents the essence of the Irish people. Reinforced by the experience of being an almost permanent party of government, and stripped of its historical and ideological meaning, it becomes the epitome of banana republicanism - the dictator's equation of criticism with treason.

Just as everything in history is repeated, the first time as tragedy and the second as farce, this notion reached its apogee of comic bathos last week when Mary O'Rourke was on Newstalk radio's Breakfast Show, talking about Enda Kenny's temerity in criticising the Taoiseach the day before he departed for Africa.

She told Ger Gilroy: "Can I say on Enda Kenny, I cannot believe a leader of a very proud party called Fine Gael committed such a disloyal treasonous act? The Taoiseach was out of the country. He was flying the flag for Ireland. As I sit here at my desk, I've a small Irish flag on my desk to remind me of the honour of being a member of the Oireachtas. He's doing business for Ireland, he's flying the flag . . . What has enraged me, absolutely enraged me is the idea that you could commit such an act of treason that you would seek to pull him down while he is away doing the Government's business, the country's business."

As a comic turn, the notion that it is treasonous to raise the awkward issue of Bertie Ahern's finances and tax affairs when he is outside the jurisdiction (including, presumably, when he is Manchester) is good for a laugh. But this "hit me now with the green flag wrapped around me" posture has a serious side.

For when you put this notion of treason beside the Taoiseach's own notion of its opposite - patriotism - you get some idea of the brazenness that besets us.

It was Ahern who described Charles Haughey as, of all things, "a patriot to his fingertips". When a man who prostitutes the most important office of State for money is a great patriot and anyone who dares to criticise the Taoiseach's finances is a traitor, the topsy turvy morality of the party stands forward, naked and unashamed.

When the party is the leader and the leader is the State, these demented notions of patriotism and treason make some kind of weird sense.

Let's remember what, in this world view, is not treasonous. It is not treason to line your pockets with private donations while you're in well-paid public office.

It is not treasonous to evade the tax and exchange laws of your country, as Haughey did, by stashing that money in the Cayman Islands. It is not treasonous to accept large sums from private citizens while you are minister for finance. Or to withhold evidence from a tribunal established by the Oireachtas until it discovers it for itself. Or to be unable to produce a tax clearance certificate. Or to state, quite bluntly, that you appoint people to State boards because they are your friends. But it is treasonous to criticise any of these things.

This notion goes back a long way, to the days when anyone who didn't agree with militant Irish nationalism was by definition "anti-national" and "unpatriotic". But it was the Haughey generation that made it a high crime of State to disagree with Fianna Fáil about things other than the national question.

O'Rourke's late brother Brian Lenihan, as early as 1963, told a party meeting in Roscommon that, in relation to a forthcoming budget, "they would meet criticism but he wanted them to remember that most, the vast majority of people from whom criticism would come, were anti-national. One found that the people who supported Fianna Fáil came from a national background".

Later, Tom McEllistrim famously said of criticism of Haughey by Des O'Malley: "That's treason." Seán Doherty justified the tapping of the phones of Bruce Arnold and Geraldine Kennedy on the grounds that they were discussing "treason".

The resort to this rhetoric now is certainly a token of desperation. But it does explain the failure of even one senior figure in a party that prides itself on its patriotism to condemn either Ahern's acceptance of money from private donors or the extraordinary stories he has told both the public and the Mahon tribunal.

If the leader of Fianna Fáil embodies the State, then by definition he cannot dishonour the State.

No amount of grubbiness, no extreme of evasion, can be seen as disloyalty to Ireland, because that quality belongs innately to those who are outside Fianna Fáil. And when patriots are traitors and traitors patriots, how can public morality mean anything?

This is, of course, the utmost codology. That we have to take it at all seriously is, in its own way, a kind of humiliation. But it is, risibly and shamefully, a fact of our strange political life.