The Mahon Tribunal reveals how much corruption was embedded in Irish life. Can we as a society change, asks Tiarnan O’Corrain.
One of the interesting things about the economic crisis is how it has teased and twisted language into ungainly shapes. From childhood we take the image of the can endlessly kicked down the road to serve as an image of procrastination and deferral. From Catholic hatred of the flesh we have the idea of the pain that purifies. Through constant reiteration these stock phrases, like rough stones on a riverbed, are smoothed and shaped: they lose their original meaning and become part of the daily moronic chorus.
Now the Mahon Tribunal threatens to provide us with a new lexicon, one we should examine carefully before it is robbed of its force by repetition.
Corruption, an image of decay, where the body is riven with infections and malignancy is, according to Mahon, endemic. The problem with corruption is that, in the body politic as well as the body physical, it tends to spread and infect every part of the system. We have had endless palaver about the ordinary decent people, about the blamelessness of the party rank and file.
Take one example of (according to Justine McCarthy) martyred innocence: Gráinne Carruth, Ahern’s former secretary and bagwoman in the most basic sense. She seemed untroubled about lying under oath to the tribunal until gravely reminded by a barrister that continuing to do so carried the charge of perjury and consequent imprisonment.
Upon hearing this, she seemed suddenly to realise that the State and its laws were not simply an imposture, and that the oath she took in the first person was binding on her. It seemed to cause a genuine shock, followed by tears and a plea to the bench, that the loyal servant, innocent lodger of large sums of cash in a foreign currency on behalf of her employer, had a duty to keep a sworn oath.
Corruption cannot thrive without such a weakened immune system. Take the former Cabinet: they knew and did nothing, or knew and helped. Now they are loud in their innocence: they were not guilty of anything save a mistaken balancing of virtues. They placed the virtue of loyalty above the viciousness of its object, personal connections and relations above principles and the law.
Fianna Fail inscribed an alternative morality in the state, an alternative set of laws where obedience to the law of the land was immoral because it implied disloyalty to the party. Corruption was moral because the mechanisms of the state were too slow, unwieldy and defective to allow necessary development to take place. It fostered the virtues of loyalty to the party and fidelity to its mission.
This mental formation is characteristic of post-colonial societies, and parties like Fianna Fail can be seen throughout Africa and India. It is probably necessary to achieving political independence. After all, overthrowing the colonial power means breaking the law. The problem comes when independence is achieved and the former revolutionary party settles down to bloat itself on the corrupt corpse of the colonial regime.
FF is interesting in this context, being a twice-revolutionary party. Having played is part in the overthrow of British rule the republican tendency that became FF overthrew their successors. Not only had they no loyalty to the British regime, they had none to the Free State that succeeded it.
They were thus free to exploit the state for party gain and personal enrichment. Secure in the morality of two directives, they proceeded to make electoral mincemeat of more scrupulous parties. All things being equal, said Lemass, the FF man will get the job. He was understating the matter.
To return to the abuse of metaphor let us speak of rotten apples. This is usually used in Ireland in an inversion of its meaning. The point is not that a few rotten apples are nothing much to worry about, but that they are likely to spoil the whole barrel. The overwhelming political success of Fianna Fail was not lost on their opponents. It appeared, and it was undoubtedly true, that the mass of Irish people were untroubled by corruption and graft, they they were more than willing to acquiesce in institutionalised dishonesty if they stood to benefit (however minutely) from it.
Renewal has to start with a general admission that the people knew what was going on. One of the remarkable things about the reaction to the Mahon tribunal is the seeming lack of consciousness about how little of this is news.
Knowing that Bertie was the man who signed blank cheques for Charles Haughey the people elected him Taoiseach over and over again. The old joke that democracy is the idea that the people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard was never truer.
Another more frightening prospect beckons. Does anyone who believe that systematic corruption of planning was confined to Dublin? Galway, Limerick and Cork all grew during the boom. Later, with the easy meat eaten and forgotten, land on the edges of country towns was rezoned to build housing estates that now stand empty and in many cases unfinished.
Some questions inevitably arise. Are we in the troika regime because of systemic political corruption as much as the behaviour of bankers? How much of the property currently in NAMA is there because of bribery and corruption? How different are we, really, from the Greeks?
And most importantly of all, are we capable of renewal? Do we want it?
