Standards were lower in 1979

The sense of loss generated by the Pope's death has many sources. In Ireland, one of them is that what is being mourned is a simpler, more innocent time.

The papal visit of 1979 can be used as benchmark to measure momentous changes. And while many people have ambivalent feelings about those changes, one common thread in so many of the responses is the notion that we have become, in the meantime, a less moral society. Back then, the feeling is, we had certainties, we had values. In all the upheavals of the quarter of a century since, those values have gone missing.

Here is a rather random selection of events in Ireland in 1979:

* In January, John Berry, a Kildare man with haemophilia, was taken to St James's Hospital in Dublin with a nose bleed. Because the hospital had no sterile water available, he was given a blood factor contaminated with hepatitis C. Later that year, a major study of haemophiliacs with liver disease found that huge numbers of them had been infected with hepatitis. Nothing was done about these findings.

* In March, PAYE workers took to the streets for the first in a series of protests against the blatant corruption of the tax system. They earned 67 per cent of national income but paid 87 per cent of income tax. That same month, minister for finance George Colley received a letter from a bank manager revealing that management had verbally condoned the hiding of hot money. No action was taken.

* Some time during the year, the Fianna Fáil TD Denis Foley gave the accountant Des Traynor £50,000 to invest for him in the Ansbacher tax scam.

* In April, Michael Cassidy, a 31-year-old Catholic who worked as a prison officer, was coming out of St MacCartan's Church in Clogher, Co Tyrone, after his sister's wedding. He was holding his three-year-old daughter by the hand. An IRA gunman approached and shot him. He was shot three times more in the head as his daughter watched. His sister and her new husband were just driving away in the wedding car when they heard the shots and looked back. So-called republicans killed 104 people in 1979, and so-called loyalists killed 18.

* In July, Joseph McColgan began to molest his daughter Sophia, then aged nine, as he had been doing for three years. When she protested, he hit her head off the handle of a door and broke her nose. She was taken to hospital and told doctors that her father had beaten her. On August 11th, a case conference was held by the North Western Health Board. It was told Mrs McColgan wanted her children taken into care. In November, a note was placed on the file in which a local garda expressed his belief that Joseph McColgan was a dangerous character. It was explained to gardaí that no legal action was being contemplated against McColgan because the evidence was not considered strong enough. Nothing was done to help Sophia or the other McColgan children, who were horribly abused for years to come.

* In February, March, September and October, seven lodgements totalling £104,748 were made into the account of minister for health Charles Haughey at Guinness and Mahon bank. The source of the lodgements has never been explained. In July, Haughey offered Allied Irish Banks a £10 million deposit from the Iraqi state bank - in effect from Saddam Hussein.

* In December, Haughey became taoiseach. He was by then spending £12,000 a month, and had a debt of £1.1 million with AIB. Within weeks of becoming taoiseach, he was able to stump up £750,000. AIB wrote off the rest.

* In September, a young boy who was being held in St Joseph's Industrial School, Ferryhouse, Co Tipperary, was prevented from attending Pope John Paul's Mass in Limerick as a punishment for running away. While most of the inmates and staff were at the Mass, he was raped by a religious brother. The rapist was removed from the school when the manager discovered what happened, and the abuse was reported to the Department of Education. But the crime was not reported to the Garda and it was only in 1999 that the rapist was convicted and sentenced to nine years' imprisonment.

Ireland may well have become more hedonistic, more materialistic and more cynical place since 1979, but it is also in some respects more moral. There is still, of course, plenty of corruption, tax evasion, murder, abuse and disrespect. But the advances are obvious. Children are better protected, and the obvious plight of a victim like Sophia McColgan is less likely to be ignored. Tax evasion tends at least to be regarded as a source of shame. The industrial schools and the Magdalen laundries (which were still in operation in 1979) have closed. The IRA is being squeezed out of existence. There is less hypocrisy and more tolerance of difference. Large areas of behaviour - drunken driving, domestic violence, environmental damage, racial hatred - that were largely beyond the moral horizon have come into view. And this moral progress, moreover, was not imposed by hierarchical authorities but created organically by civil society. Smugness about the present may be gravely misplaced, but so is nostalgia for the recent past.