AN INTERESTED visitor recently asked me if I thought Proinsias De Rossa's libel action had harmed him. I considered the question and said I thought it had harmed him a bit, on the level of barnyard machismo. He hadn't exactly knocked Eamon Dunphy off the dung heap, and crowed in victory all over him. Though neither had Dunphy established himself as cock o' the walk.
"But what about all the publicity given to the lurid things the Workers' Party is supposed to have done?" my questioner asked. "Will that not harm Democratic Left?" I didn't particularly think it would. "The Irish," I heard myself announce confidently, "are strangers to moral indignation."
My assertion may seem to have been belied lately by all the furious letters this newspaper has been printing about the young priest in Rome who has made a name for himself by being petulant about President Robinson. But although those letters, both for and against him, are indeed indignant, this is a cover for the urgency with which two interest groups wish to restate their cases.
Conservative Catholics quite rightly want to attack the President for not being a conservative Catholic. Liberals, including clerical liberals, quite rightly want to defend Robinsonian liberalism. Nobody has been genuinely morally outraged by anything to do with the President's visit to the Vatican. The overblown verbosity of the priest's simulated outrage will be achingly familiar to anyone who has had to listen to the young fogeys who rise to prominence in student debating societies. They always talk like that.
There is one person in public life, however, who is in some ways a martyr to indignation. That is Albert Reynolds. We are all aufait with his sensitivity to criticism. One reason for this may be that he succeeded Charlie Haughey. Mr Reynolds must have been more sensitive than most to the mystery surrounding Mr Haughey's fortune. He himself could show where and how he'd made his money, so it must have been even more striking to him than to the rest of us that Mr Haughey declined to comment on how he had come by his.
MR REYNOLDS may have felt that one Fianna Fail leader who never apologised and never explained, but on the other hand never sued either, was quite enough. He may thought that the best way to distance himself and the party from the Haughey regime was by letting no shadow sully his own good name.
My impression, however and part of my thesis about moral indignation - is that most people found this anxiety faintly laughable. In all honesty, they couldn't see why Albert got so worked up. To care so much as to go through the High Court in London twice! In ordinary life in this country people slag and are slagged, and a person would much rather pretend to be bad than be caught making himself out to be good.
Ordinary society has little or no time for righteousness. There is a complex underground system to do with right and wrong. But it is far removed from the simplicities of "But that's wrong!", or "We must do right".
That's not how things work. Thus, for instance, the letter writing classes will get all upset if Michael Lowry is reelected in Tipperary. "How can they?" they'll say. "Don't they know that Michael Lowry did this, that and the other? Have they no morals?"
But the local electorate may see things differently, as their man against the whited sepulchres above in Dublin. They may in general see a sinner as better fitted than a saint to represent their interests and get things done for them. They may be amused, admiring or sorry for him, or they may have been at school with his wife's first cousin's brother in law. Situational ethics might almost have been invented for the relationship between the Irish voter and an Irish politician. After all, the people always knew that Mr Haughey, utterly unaccountably, could live very, very lavishly. Did they mind? They didn't seem to. The democratic process was impeccable. They voted him in: they voted his party in the party voted him its leader. QED. His squireen ways were not found offensive because they were taken as a lifestyle choice - an alternative to being something blow dried in cafe society, for example - not as a shift in class allegiance.
The Arms Crisis had cleared him of any suspicion of West Britishness, to put it mildly. He raised golden eagles on his private island but he might equally well have been raising pigeons in a loft. And even on the south side, people are only three or four generations away from the time when the Irish made what shift they could to survive a constitutionally hostile government.
Even there, the historical disjunction between public and private morality obtains. The shrieks of outrage at the very name of Haughey are, over and over again, expressions of pure class snobbery, rather than true moral indignation.
THERE IS, of course, as deep a reservoir of moral revulsion here as anywhere else. There was no forgiveness at all for the paedophile Brendan Smyth. There is none about the contaminated blood scandal. There is a range of disgusts that are genuinely felt.
I think people were put off the institutional Catholic Church to a measurable degree by Dr Eamonn Casey's double standards. I think they responded to the beef tribunal, not with indignation about agribusiness, politicians who bend the rules for agribusiness, and civil servants who bend the rules for the politicians, but with real shock at the furlined nest lawyers have made for themselves.
There is probably as much moral indignation sloshing around the Republic as anywhere else, but in regard to politicians it doesn't predictably apply. They are not rewarded for goodness: a noble eccentric like Noel Browne is one thing, but short shrift is given to anyone who insists on reminding us of our shortcomings; a Conor Cruise O'Brien, for instance (PDs please note). And equally, they're not necessarily punished for badness.
This makes it very hard to raise the tone of political life. Or it would, but for an important twist to this relationship with morality. The people do not approve of overt cynicism. They do want respect paid to goodness and honour, so there have to be tribunals and so forth, giving the impression of a lively moral sense at work in our system. But after all the huffing and puffing, when it comes down to judging one person, to saying so and so is unworthy, or so and so is corrupt or so and so is wicked.
Maybe this time it will be different. But Parnell apart, the Irish public has so far shown great zest for pursuing errant politicians, but none for the kill.