Politics is a morally demanding career, writes Garret Fitzgerald. Many of the decisions politicians have to take involve choices between doing what the public good requires, or doing instead what will be popular - either with the electorate in general or with a particular self-interested group whose votes may be lost if they are not kept happy.
A politician who invariably ignores popularity by always doing the right thing, and who never dodges awkward issues, may have great difficulty in being re-elected, and may thus find himself unable thereafter to do anything worthwhile for the country and people he has chosen to serve.
A politician who dodges every awkward issue and always aims to do the popular thing may well be re-elected, but can fulfil no useful function. Perhaps such politicians convince themselves that if re-elected they will at some time in the future do something worthwhile - but the right moment for that may never come.
Of course most politicians who actually secure office in government fall between these two extremes. Every government does many things that are in the public interest, despite often incurring unpopularity with at least some part of the electorate for doing so.
But all governments also dodge some awkward issues and, especially as they approach election time, they often succumb to the temptation to do things that are not in the general public interest in an attempt to secure votes.
Parties in Opposition can be even more irresponsible in what they promise. I still wince at some unwise promises I was persuaded, or persuaded myself, to make when in opposition in 1981 - subconsciously justifying my actions by reference to the need to stop Charles Haughey from securing an overall majority.
Much of the criticism of politicians derives from a failure to grasp the nature and extent of the moral dilemmas that a political career imposes on those who undertake it. From one point of view one can say that politics is the morally most demanding of careers - and thus, if you have the taste for it, the most morally exciting career available. From another point of view, it places greater strains on a person's moral fibre than some are able to take.
In none of these observations am I referring to financial misbehaviour by politicians abusing their positions for personal advantage. Certainly we've recently seen evidence of some spectacular examples of this kind of behaviour, but such misbehaviour has distracted attention from the routine moral challenges of a political career.
What politicians will not say is that the source of the temptations they so often face derive from greed and selfishness within the electorate itself. In a constituency-based system in which half or more of constituencies may be marginal, such selfish sectoral or private interests can, and do, exert huge pressure on politicians at election times.
Sectoral pressures have become more and more acute in recent decades. In the past, political ideologies were much more powerful motivators: for a long time a clear majority of Irish people were motivated primarily by loyalties to political parties that went back to the Treaty split. Issues of personal economic advantage did not easily divert such people from their party commitment.
Today few people with a personal economic or financial interest will be deterred from pursuing it across party lines, and such material interests now loom much larger in our society than in the past. There has also been the growth of the "compensation culture", with people expecting the government to bale them out of difficulties they have got themselves into.
The pressure on politicians and parties from private interests to favour them at the expense of the public interest is thus stronger than in the past. Within politics itself there has been a change of focus. As the old political divide faded through the 1960s and 1970s, it was for a period replaced by the issue of Charles Haughey and the growth of an element of corruption within the political system.
But with the tribunals now well advanced, and the consequent exposure of that element to public view, this seems to have become a less neuralgic issue for the electorate. Moreover, party divisions have become blurred by the emergence of a situation in which almost any combination of parties other than a combination of the two largest parties - who together would have a disastrously large majority of 80 seats - could find themselves in government. All these factors have combined to make politics more vulnerable to the selfish element in our society. And it would seem that the capacity of politicians to withstand such pressures has weakened.
Because our elections are decided constituency by constituency, the fate of many TDs is decided by a quite small number of votes. In 1997 Fianna Fáil won eight seats by margins of less than 600 votes. If in those eight seats 3,500 of those who voted Fianna Fáil had been persuaded instead to back an Opposition candidate, a Rainbow Coalition would have returned to office, free of any need for support from Independents seeking to be bought off with "goodies" for their constituency.
With so much depending on a relative handful of votes in a number of constituencies, leaders of all parties come under intense pressure from nervous backbenchers to concede to local demands or to give in to pressure from well-organised national pressure groups.
Unhappily, too many politicians tend to discount the floating votes of the minority of people who are genuinely concerned for the future of their country, rather than for their own narrow interests. For such people do exist, and they have turned the tide in some elections - such as that of November 1982 when Fine Gael and Labour had little to offer except a commitment to halt the appalling rush toward financial bankruptcy deriving from Fianna Fáil's dangerous watering down of the January 1982 Budget.
It seems to me that many elections in earlier decades, including some that brought Fianna Fáil into power, were the result of shifts in voting by thoughtful floating voters, concerned for the good of the country as they saw it. It is a pity that politicians so often write off this well-motivated minority, often losing ground with an important group of voters who are switched off by blatant vote-catching by political parties.
gfitzgerald@irish-times.ie