The chairman of the Standards in Public Office Commission, Mr Justice Smith, warns that evidence given in the various tribunals is damaging Ireland's reputation abroad, and endangering its status as a location for business, writes John Waters
He points out that Ireland has entered the world Corruption Perception Index at number 23 with a bullet, and that the 2002 report of the Joseph Rowntree Trust lists Ireland as among the most corrupt states in Europe. Questioning these perceptions, he urges a more balanced perspective.
I believe he misses the point. The destruction of Ireland's international reputation is among the objectives of those driving the tribunal bandwagon - mainly left-wing journalists and politicians harbouring resentments about the nature of Irish society who have been denied other means of gaining power.
Tribunals are the cutting-edge of a recent revolution in Irish life, a consolation prize to left-wing sentiment disappointed at the failure to create a left-right divide. Tribunals emerged in the early 1990s as a collateral aspect of Fianna Fáil-led coalitions, intended to police Fianna Fáil's value system but also providing the party with a convenient earthing device to disable the negative energies which threatened the stability of government. Fianna Fáil had electoral power, but its opponents had an arguably more potent weapon: the ability to manipulate both public discourse and the minority factions upon which the party depended to remain in power.
Mr Justice Smith said that, compared with other societies, Ireland is not unduly affected by corruption.The comparison being made, however, is not with other societies, but between real life and a standard unique to Irish society.
This story began in the reconstruction that followed the Great Famine of the 1840s, when the Catholic Church took on full stewardship of the material and moral life of the nation. Among the ingenious devices of that reconstruction was the creation of a new currency of social status, demoting materialist comparison as an indicator of human dignity.
The core of this reconstructed culture formed, until recently, part of the core ideology of the State, asserting that the dignity of an individual was not to be judged from what he had, but from what he was. The prescribed virtues were industry, chastity, frugality, passivity and inoffensiveness. It wasn't that money didn't matter - it did, but in the sense that wealth endangered the moral standing of an individual unless accompanied by the prescribed virtues.
In 2003, having gone through two periods of relative national prosperity, one might cynically observe that the Irish eschewal of wealth was a sour-grapes frugality predicated on the absence of money. But there is a real cultural problem about accommodating ourselves to prosperity in a society which culturally disparages the pursuit or attainment of material acquisitions. Nobody or nothing since independence has straightforwardly squared this circle. Among the many achievements of Fianna Fáil in reconstructing this Irish reality was the underhand accommodation of frugality and materialism within the same belief-system. Conscious that we needed to get real to get rich, but mindful of the impediment of cultural frugality, the party forged a middle way, pursuing a broadly materialist agenda while paying lip-service to the old pieties for fear of frightening the cultural horses. The creation of wealth came to involve various sleights of hand. For example, wealth was okay if the initiative was external, thus avoiding upset to the local balance. Among natives, underhandedness became something admirable, lessening envy and resentment.
A local could have and flaunt wealth by remaining culturally connected with the community in a manner exaggerated in proportion to his wad. Hence the cute-hoor syndrome, which drew the community into a conspiracy of celebration at the shady enrichment of one of its own. Fianna Fáil's support for this mutant value system provided the focus for its opponents for the past several decades.
The revolution represented by the tribunals is the cutting edge of a policy which seeks to reconcile piety and prosperity in a new way. But it has failed - mainly because of the dishonesty of its stated intentions and because the virus of the national materialist double-think has infected the tribunal process itself, with lawyers getting rich from investigating the phenomenon of covert enrichment.
The tribunals persist in their revolution at the insistence of a relatively small group of ideologically motivated zealots who carry a deep resentment against a culture which allowed those who refused to take it literally to line their own nests, while they, the virtuously frugal, remained poor. Part of their agenda is indeed the shaming of Ireland in the eyes of the world. And, yes, this revolution now threatens to strangle any hope of sustaining Irish prosperity, because it attacks the only way we know of getting rich.