People insist on real sense of fairness

The sharpest of all Irish political commentators, George Bernard Shaw, pointed out the problem with the Golden Rule of doing unto others as you would wish them to do to you: they may not have the same tastes.

Your own values, emotions and judgments may not be a very good guide to those of other people. The Manchester United supporter who gives David Beckham duvet covers as Christmas presents to all his friends and family is making the fundamental mistake of assuming that what pleases himself will also please others.

The same goes for our most prominent Manchester United fan, Bertie Ahern, and his increasingly miserable Government. As they contemplate the disaster of the Tipperary South by-election they may begin to grasp the vanity of believing that the Irish people as a whole have succumbed to the arrogance, cynicism and amorality they themselves have embraced.

Having reduced their own aspirations to a world-weary pragmatism, they are beginning to discover that the society they purport to represent is still in thrall to funny old concepts like honesty, equality and self-respect.

It would be hard to exaggerate the scale of what happened in Tipperary South. Fianna Fail has had bad times before, and they have been reflected in the vote. In its first election in 1927, when the party was still in its infancy, Fianna Fail took 28.5 per cent of the vote in the old Tipperary constituency, and thereafter established itself at around 50 per cent.

In a by-election in 1947, when Clann na Poblachta rode a wave of public disenchantment to a stunning victory, Fianna Fail still topped the poll on the first count with 32 per cent. The following year, in an election in which the national party lost office, Fianna Fail held nearly 50 per cent of the vote in the new Tipperary South constituency. Last week it took 22 per cent.

In Clonmel, the part of the constituency most typical of the urban Ireland in which the next election will be decided, it got 15 per cent. This isn't a bad result, it's a meltdown. While no one expects these kinds of figures to be repeated in a general election, the range of possibilities of what might befall Fianna Fail has widened dramatically at one end. It now stretches all the way to the abyss.

It has become possible because Fianna Fail has missed a crucial point about contemporary Ireland. It allowed itself to believe that, for Irish society as a whole, economic growth had become an end in itself. It succumbed to the illusion that any government that could point to stratospheric statistics for GDP and GNP had become invulnerable because it was delivering what the country really wanted. Everything else - sleaze, inequality, mediocrity - would be just fodder for the chattering classes of Dublin 4.

NOR is it true that most Irish people ever saw economic growth as an end in itself. The old religious language through which the society articulated its sense of a broader destiny may have a drastically diminished resonance. The nationalist rhetoric which was its secular equivalent and constant companion may have lost most of its meaning.

But the fundamental impulse that lay behind both, the desire to live in a place we could be proud of, is undiminished. If anything, the erosion of the romantic and messianic ways of expressing that desire - all that stuff about Ireland's spiritual empire and the Spirit of the Nation - has allowed the basic impulse itself to emerge more clearly and more sharply.

There's nothing mysterious or mystical about this desire. The abstract wealth of an economy means relatively little unless it is translated into a decent quality of life. That includes obvious things like health, housing and transport, all of which are in deep disarray. But it also includes a sense of fairness, an order of things in which the dignity of each individual is protected and reinforced by the social, legal and political systems.

This doesn't mean that the Irish public has suddenly become intolerant of strokes and roguery. But it does have a minimum requirement, that at least the appearance of equality and decency is maintained. It's one thing to bend the rules and get away with it. It's quite another to announce loud and clear that for certain people there are no rules at all. And that is what the culture of impunity that has culminated in the O'Flaherty saga has done.

The O'Flaherty appointment offended the public because, much as some commentators profess their inability to understand what the former judge did wrong, the final result of what was done was very clear. The public understands very well that if you spring a lawfully convicted prisoner from jail with knotted sheets and stolen keys what you are doing is wrong. It doesn't understand how springing the same prisoner with a word in the right ears, a concocted psychological report and a court-room charade is any better.

The real insult, though, was the deliberate, calculated statement, implicit in the decision to appoint Hugh O'Flaherty to the European Investment Bank, that, if you are one of the elect, such actions don't really matter. Careful ambiguity, nods and winks and cute-hoorism will still get you very far in Ireland. But this was an utterly unambiguous action.

It was so nakedly contemptuous of democratic illusions that it forced the public to react one way or the other. Either this kind of thing was acceptable, in which case there would be a lot more of it, or it wasn't. The easy drift of mild annoyance and half-admiring evasion simply wasn't an option.

At least, though, these humble servants of the people have actually done the State some service. They've forced our society to see that its present leaders are not going to create the new public morality without which Ireland will be no more than a crass market-place. They've given that task back to those to whom it really belongs, the restless, angry citizens of a democracy that needs to reinvent itself.

fotoole@irish-times.ie