There is no sense that the culture of cute hoorism which made regulation impossible in Ireland is going away
THE GOVERNMENT'S clever campaign to destroy political satire by making it entirely redundant continued last week. Who, for example, could have dared to invent the musings, on RTÉ Radio One's Morning Ireland, of Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern?
Discussing the distressing incidents of kidnappings of bank staff, he began to ponder a great mystery: “The question must be asked why is it that we are one of those societies where there is a high proportion of cash in our system? Ourselves and Italy, we understand, are the two countries where there is a lot of cash in comparison with most of the other European countries. And this is something that I think we also have to look at as a nation ourselves.”
Now, let’s all try to think very hard. What could Italy and Ireland have in common that means that there is a “lot of cash” washing around in the system? Is there a papal anathema on cheques and credit transfers? Not that I know of. Are the Irish and Italians similarly obsessed with the fear that they might run out of ready money for ice cream and thus inclined to keep wodges of wonga in the drawer just in case? Hardly.
There may, however, be a way out of Dermot Ahern’s perplexity. Or even two ways out. He might ask his friend and former boss Bertie Ahern for advice on the matter. Bertie, after all, has some expertise in this area and could no doubt tell Dermot a great deal about why it is better to deal in cash. And if even Bertie can’t unwrap the enigma, Dermot could always try looking up every tree in north Dublin.
The interesting thing about Dermot Ahern’s deadpan ruminations on Ireland, Italy and the uses of cash is that no one laughed in his face. They were treated as apparently innocent, almost philosophically disinterested questions about things we have to “look at as a nation”.
It was as if there was a real likelihood that the Minister was being serious, that he genuinely does not know why cash remains the preferred medium of exchange in large areas of Irish life.
And this in turn draws attention to an important aspect of our present predicament. In any serious analysis, it is obvious that one of the forces that has created the current catastrophe is the absence of a sense of public morality.
For all the momentous change, for all the breathtaking leaps into economic globalism and 21st century technology, we remained stuck in the old culture of cute hoorism, strokes, cronyism, impunity, pulling fast ones and treating the law as an a la carte menu.
That culture of corruption made regulation impossible, encouraged the toleration of large-scale white-collar criminality and sustained an untouchable elite whose arrogance and recklessness were inflated to fatal proportions.
You might think that we had learned something about the cost of this culture. But there is no sense at all that public discourse has actually changed. It is as if nothing ever happened, as if we are entirely innocent of the amorality and the price we have paid for it. Aside from the fact that we are still supposed to listen with a straight face to the likes of Dermot Ahern’s deliberations on the mysteries of cash in the Irish system, let’s take two more or less random examples from the last week alone.
On Morning Ireland's 25th anniversary programme on Thursday, the farmer and agricultural journalist PJ Nolan launched a spontaneous song of praise for "the success stories like the Goodman group" and went on to say, again entirely without challenge, that the beef tribunal that dominated domestic Irish politics in the early 1990s was "a waste of time unless you were a barrister or a journalist. We got three million in fines for not paying PRSI, that was it, you know".
The idea that the beef tribunal was about the non-payment of PRSI is simply bizarre: it uncovered the theft of vast quantities of beef, the largest tax fraud that had ever been revealed in the history of the State and an astonishing scam that stretched from Charles Haughey to Saddam Hussein. But it’s now possible for the State’s most important news programme to simply obliterate all of that from the national memory banks.
On the same day, meanwhile, the Dáil’s Public Accounts Committee was hearing evidence about another huge rip-off of public money, in this case one that is happening right now. In this time of crisis in the public finances, the State is losing €376 million because charges for the use of beds in public hospitals are not being recouped from private insurers. And Prof Brendan Drumm of the HSE revealed to the committee that “hundreds” of consultants are putting more private patients in public beds than they are allowed to do by law and by their own contracts.
This is a flagrant abuse of scarce public resources. So what is the HSE doing? It is writing to the consultants involved. Are those cries of terror we hear on the breeze or stifled yelps of helpless laughter?