The perception persists that the epidemic of scandals is symptomatic of the allegedly sub-modern ethos of parishpump politics, so denigrated by those to the fore in unmasking the unethical and corrupt. In fact, the corruption is a consequence of the modernisation of Irish politics for three decades.
The worldwide infestation of modern politics by corruption is chiefly a function of what political scientists call "the quark". It is appropriate, perhaps, since the word has its origins in the work of an Irish writer, that Irish politics is now dominated by this phenomenon also.
The word comes "Three quarks for Muster Mark" in Finnegans Wake. The concept was adapted by the American physicist Murray GellMann, to designate a subatomic particle believed to be one of the essential building blocks of matter. Although the concept has apparently proved very useful in the understanding of elementary particles, nobody has ever succeeded in finding a distinct, self-standing quark.
The political quark relates to the unit of public opinion on a given subject at a frozen moment, the holy grail to which modern politics is addicted. In a typical general election campaign, the main political parties might between them spend £1 million on opinion polling alone, in ascertaining the quark's momentary state. On factoring in the cost of advertising to influence, appease, massage and reassure the quark, it becomes clear that the main distortion in political life arises not from the inherent venality of politicians or public officials but from a culture of politics which favours following rather than leading.
The scandals under investigation at present relate to the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. It is not a coincidence that the first public poll of Irish political opinion was in 1969. The emergence of the quark was the reason political parties began to require more and more funding, and is therefore the context in which most of our political corruption must be seen.
The reason political parties need to put the hammer on businessmen is to compete with other parties to discover and tap into the quark. Even those instances of money being accepted by individual politicians for their own enrichment owes its enabling ambiguity to the necessity of funding the pursuit of the quark. This is what allows businessmen and politicians to talk about "supporting the democratic process", when really they mean greasing the wheels of opportunity for themselves.
What is the quark an alternative to? Leadership, perhaps; but, more pertinently, that which distinguishes the leadership model of politics from an obsession with the public mood: connection with real people, what we disparagingly refer to as "the politics of the parish-pump". This is what distinguished the Lemass, Cosgrave and de Valera eras from those of Haughey, FitzGerald, Bruton and Ahern. It is a cliche that modern politics lacks leadership, but the alternative notion that politics today is led by the public misses the point. By "the public" in this regard, we do not mean the voting public, still less the flesh-and-blood people on your road; we mean the cybernetic notion of the electorate which dominates the thinking of political parties and the media.
The quark, then, is a symptom of a model of politics which sees people not as individual human beings, but as units, atoms and sub-particles in a process which can be approached as matter and understood according to laws of quota-controlled representative sampling and statistical probability theory.
The politics of the quark results in nobody deciding anything, thinking anything or leading anywhere. In pursuit of the quark, politicians follow the media who follow the consensus of the public view garnered from opinion polls which are a regurgitation of a debased political discourse laden down with reheated cliches and political correctness.
Nobody is in charge, and nobody contributes anything new, so the whole self-recycling contraption stays upright only in the manner of a bicycle: through forward movement under its own momentum.
It is ironic that the people most exercised about political corruption and the untoward relationship between politics and business have always been the most zealous in seeking to extinguish the last sparks of what is pejoratively termed "clientelism".
Clientelism had many faults, and was prone to abuses and corruption, but these dangers were small compared to the amorality associated with the politics of the quark. (A further irony is supplied by the fact that, since much of the money given by businessmen to politicians over the years will have ended up paying bills for media advertising, the chances are that the contents of the proverbial brown paper bags went towards paying the salaries of those now seeking to expose such practices.) As always, you need to dig much deeper to find the true immorality. The original sin besetting modern politics is not brown paper bags but the detachment of politics from the concerns of real people. If this had not occurred, business people would never have been able to gain special favours from politicians, nor would the notion of massive profiteering from a change of land usage make any sense.
The real immorality resides in the creation of such massive opportunities for the exploitation of the basic needs of human beings, which could not have occurred if politics had remained rooted to the community.
Irish politics has come to resemble an overused five-pound note: in its mindless pursuit of the non-existent, it has been recycled so much it is unrecognisable as itself. An appropriate symbol all round, when you come to think of it.
jwaters@irish-times.ie