Duff envisaged a moral community of action that never came to pass
ONE of the difficulties today facing any reviewer tasked with assessing the role, status and contribution of anyone in Irish public life since independence is that the contagion of the present inevitably seeps backwards. One effect of this is that a judgement made about a person even as recently as 10 years ago might well take on a toxic tinge in 2011.
The scandal of the Magdalene laundries, along with that of paedophile priests, is already having this kind of deleterious retrospect effect. We find ourselves asking not just what higher ecclesiastics were up to but also what were senior politicians and civil servants doing, or not doing. And then there were lots of other prominent public figures.
