Hierarchy has put FF to shame

'Two houses", say the opening lines of Romeo and Juliet, "both alike in dignity

'Two houses", say the opening lines of Romeo and Juliet, "both alike in dignity." Let's call them Fianna Fáil and the Irish Catholic Church. In institutional terms, both are rooted in the mass democratic movement led by Daniel O'Connell in the mid-19th century.

Both built on an intense sense of locality - the parish in "parish pump politics". Both combined that broad localism with a hierarchical structure that emphasised loyalty and obedience to the leadership. Both acquired a capacity to wield temporal power while wrapping it in a powerful spiritual mystique - God in one case, the nation in the other. Both built an extraordinary hegemony in the new State, one in the political field, the other in the moral arena.

And both paid the price of having too much power for too long. The two institutions maintained such dominance that they became arrogant, closed and ultimately corrupt. That corruption consisted not just in the sins of a minority - financial sleaze in Fianna Fáil, sexual abuse in the church - but in the reaction of the majority to their revelation. Both closed ranks and placed the limitation of damage to the institution's reputation far above the need to honestly confront what had happened.

A dispassionate observer, trying to predict how these two institutions would ultimately cope with the challenges of internal corruption, would have predicted with some confidence that Fianna Fáil would have adjusted more quickly to the need for profound change. It is an essentially pragmatic organisation, engaged in the business of running an open, fast-changing democracy. The church, on the other hand, is limited by a very powerful set of intellectual and institutional structures. What we've learned in the last week is that, astonishing as it may seem, Fianna Fáil is more obdurate, more blindly loyal and more rigidly defensive than the Irish Catholic Church.

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The church acquired a new style of leadership with the accession of Diarmuid Martin to the diocese of Dublin. He has been a huge gain for Irish public life - articulate, unregimented, thoughtful. Along with some of his fellow bishops, he has fundamentally altered the terms on which the church engages with Irish society, switching from the arrogant display of power to a language of morally serious persuasion. And when this shift met its most serious internal trial, with Cardinal Connell's legal challenge to the investigation of child abuse by priests in the Dublin diocese, he held his nerve. The church had both the moral resources and the political nous to move quietly but effectively against its old leadership. It made a decision that the painful process of coming to terms with its own failings and restoring moral credibility would not be stalled by the old defensive legal stratagems.

In both his integrity of purpose and his political intelligence, Diarmuid Martin inadvertently exposed the sheer extent of Fianna Fáil's abject gutlessness. If all its senior figures were steeped in a culture of corruption, they would actually be more admirable than they are now. They would, in that case, be sincere in their belief that Bertie Ahern did nothing wrong in taking large sums of money from private donors. They would be genuinely admiring of his brass neck in trying to present his legal challenge to the Mahon tribunal as a defence of the Constitution and of human rights. But they don't believe any of this.

We know this because, at the time of the McCracken tribunal report, they all lined up to express their abhorrence of Charles Haughey's acceptance of money from Ben Dunne. They applauded Ahern when he declared the public's right to "an absolute guarantee of the financial probity and integrity of their elected representatives, officials and, above all, Ministers" a "core value" of Irish democracy. They made it clear that this was not just a matter of the amount of money involved: Brian Lenihan, for example, told the Dáil that "any payment, however small, can be construed as imposing an obligation on the public representative".

They accepted, too, that politicians couldn't go around claiming that their financial affairs were an essentially private matter. Mary Hanafin, in her maiden speech in the Dáil, put it perfectly: "as public representatives our affairs must be open to a greater public interest than the affairs of other citizens. Each candidate for public office knowingly accepts this because public confidence in the workings of the House is the cornerstone of Irish democracy."

They also queued up, when Michael Noonan as minister for justice allowed the Blood Transfusion Service to fight Brigid McCole in the courts, to condemn his appeal to legal advice as an unacceptable abandonment of political responsibility.

They know damn well that Ahern shouldn't have taken the money and that his attempts to hide behind his lawyers are merely prolonging the evasion of that blunt reality. But they're too cowardly, too focused on short-term careerism, to say so. Senior Ministers are less willing to challenge their hierarchy than are clerics who have taken a vow of obedience. Even the church realised that the long-term health of the institution is more important than loyalty to the boss. Fianna Fáil is still willing to drag down the whole party to shore up a lame-duck leader.