Silly phrase in Moriarty report

There was just one piece of rhetorical bombast in the Moriarty tribunal report that, so far, I have come across, and it is on page 544 of the report.

It asserts that the scale of the funds obtained by Charles Haughey while he held public office and the secretive nature of the payments "can only be said to have devalued the quality of a modern democracy".

This excess would be overlooked, because of the overall excellence of the report, were it not for this silly phrase having being plucked from the report by most of the media to highlight the significance of what Charles Haughey did. It is nonsense.

Before I am accused of weaving an apologia for Charlie Haughey let me acknowledge that I was stunned by the report. Stunned not so much by the revelation that he obtained such enormous sums of money while he served in public office - although the scale of those were staggering - but by what he did to get his hands on such monies and how he arranged for those monies to be laundered so as to deceive not just the tax authorities but even his closest associates.

This was not just a man with a weakness for cash, compulsively dipping into the till now and again, this was someone who with deliberation and premeditation robbed money from the State, from his party, from donors and associates, and who calculatedly exploited the illness of his colleague for his own illicit enrichment.

The report is a terrible indictment of Charles Haughey, a person I came to be fond of and to admire in many respects. I am still fond of him and still admire him in many respects, but accommodating the perfidy revealed by the Moriarty tribunal report is, well, demanding.

There is no excusing what the report reveals, there is no denying the shocking significance. But, as with us all, his misdeeds do not tell the whole story of the man. He was very clever, funny, fascinating, outrageous, often (not always!) well-intentioned; he was charismatic and at times even charming, warm and vulnerable. Incidentally, because I disagreed with him politically, I did not, and do not, go along with "all the good he did" stuff, although I admire his courage in the initiative he took on Northern Ireland in 1987 and I acknowledge his role in bringing about the economic success that has been such a boon for many.

But back to the bombast.

If what Michael Moriarty is getting at is that the quality of democracy is devalued by the funding of parties or politicians by private donations, then of course he is right.

Private finance is a cancer in political systems. It perverts that system, subverts the supposed equality that underpins that system, devalues the quality of democracy. And it doesn't make a damn difference whether this is done secretively or openly. It is still pernicious, still devaluing.

And it is still happening, and very few people seem to care. The buying of politicians obviously is iniquitous. But how is the buying of politicians as a job lot - i.e. the buying of a political party - not worse?

And that is precisely how our so-called democracy is organised.

And another thing . . . The focus on Charlie Haughey as the personification of corruption in Irish society and as the font and origin of corruption is not just nonsense but distorting in a way that compounds corruption.

First, Charlie as the font and origin of corruption. He wasn't long born when the seeds of the worst piece of organised corruption got under way here: the Irish Hospitals Sweepstakes. Yes, this did not get going until 1930, four years after Charlie was born - and that may seem suspicious to some - but the seeds of that piece of skulduggery were laid within weeks of the foundation of the State, as a new book by Joe McAnthony will reveal in 2007.

As for Charlie being responsible for all the corruption surrounding land rezoning and planning, what is the evidence for that? That the environment he induced was conducive to such corruption? Come off it!

As for the distorting bit . . . The real corruption in society is not that Charlie Haughey pilfered the equivalent of €41 million during the course of his career, it is that people are able to do that now in a single year, and repeat it year on year, having done nothing at all or very little other than exploit a dysfunctional property market to the detriment of everyone else. That the scale of inequality is far beyond anything that is conceivably justified by any rational criteria - a few thousands making millions a year and a million living on less than the equivalent of €15,000 a year. That poorer people die of the major diseases years - sometimes decades - earlier than do rich people. And on and on.

Charlie Haughey was one of the foremost proponents of that system - which has generated such inequality - but he was/is not the only one, and that depredation by him and so many others was/is far worse than the pilfering of any monies.