An ethical society - Why don’t we hold anyone to account?

Deputy Mick Wallace was expected to make a statement to the Dáil yesterday about his tax-dodging and maybe his multi-million euro failed loans, but yesterday’s decision by Ceann Comhairle Seán Barrett ruling out any such mea maxima culpa matinee precluded that enthralling possibility.

Mr Wallace wanted to speak about his €2.1m settlement — how can it can be so called, as he admits it may never be paid? — with the Revenue Commissioners. However, the Dáil Committee of Members Interests will meet tomorrow to discuss the reality-as-farce, farce-as-reality circus.

The committee, which is being by Independent Thomas Pringle, may examine if Mr Wallace contravened ethics legislation since his election to Leinster House by not attempting to repay outstanding Vat. Whether it can match its conclusions with anything stronger than a pink gin remains to be seen. Like the rest of us, the committee may do censure but real, dissuading consequences are a horse of an entirely different colour.

That Mr Wallace still has a choice in how he might deal with these issues underlines again one of the great weaknesses in public life — the inability to quickly hold those who have done wrong or failed in their professional duty to any sort of meaningful, exemplary account.

The discovery of disgraced former Anglo Irish chief turned soccer supporter Sean FitzPatrick at a €550-a-night hotel in Poznan at the weekend is another of recurring vignettes that rubs salt into this deep, still-festering wound.

This self-destructive culture of carry-on-regardless means we can have no expectation that standards of any kind might prevail because we cannot enforce them if someone — politician, regulator, banker, hospital consultant, judge, journalist, or teacher — chooses to give two fingers to the kind of professional conduct or oversight that defines a functioning, responsible and honest society.

That Mr Wallace’s future remains in his own hands indicts us all and especially indicts our political system. It can only engender the kind of cynicism that leads to social division and failure. Even worse, it opens the door for the kind of extremism that serves no-one, not even those who advocate it.

This Government, as we have celebrated many times before, was given a mandate to impose reform that none of its predecessors imagined, much less enjoyed, yet the hopes expressed through that vote become more forlorn every day. The much-championed constitutional convention seems to have pathetically set its ambitions somewhere between a dull civics class and a overly earnest pre-marriage course debate. Two of the first issues it will consider, it seems, are the length of a president’s term in office and lowering the voting age. These questions, in the context of the failure all around us, are as relevant as Mr Wallace’s comedy earrings.

We are told the bankers who gambled away the country’s future may not face charges because we have no laws to confront such behaviour. Who is preparing these laws? When will they be brought before the Dáil to be enacted? We are told that we have no mechanism to indict Mr Wallace and bring to an end the offence his presence in our parliament occasions. Why not? Did we not learn from Lowry, Lawlor, Callely, and the rest of them?

We were, for a while, fobbed off with the patronising and faux paternal reprimand that anger is not a policy. It is not but, in the absence of any policy that might make a real difference, it may be all that is left to us.