We must create new structures to replace State’s failing institutions

THE furore cumulating yesterday in the resignation of Garda Commissioner Callinan and the intensifying pressure now on the Minister for Justice, Alan Shatter, is important.

But ultimately Callinan is important for the greater issues he signifies, and the larger legacy he will ultimately play only a smaller part in.

In an era where news is instant and the consequence of controversy measured in the hours it can consume, streams of Garda controversy are forming a considerable deluge. But controversy itself is an unreliable guide to significance.

Garda controversies over penalty points; the level of cooperation of the force with GSOC; the unexplained but suspicious events that may have been an eavesdropping operation on GSOC, the body charged with investing gardaí; are all further instalments on a theme. For 20 years, from the early 1990s, there has been an inferno of all institutional authority that is continuing and gathering pace. One scandal after another has consumed public confidence and bred private cynicism.

In important respects there is little substance left of the legacy, created by the events, on which the State and its institutions were founded nearly a century ago. There are no more great trees left standing under which to shelter. A fire has consumed them all. Gardaí, clergy, politicians, bankers, civil servants, leaders of revered charities have been swallowed in the flames — reputationally reduced to ashes.

Institutional stumps remain on the landscape, more an eerie reminder of what they were, or were to be, than of what they are supposed to do. It’s not all our own fault nor it all to be regretted. History has winnowed some of the significance of what we are commemorating away. Entry into what is now the EU, and then the Good Friday Agreement fundamentally changed the basis of state authority: firstly in relation to swathes of increasingly important policy that matter in people’s daily lives and secondly in relation to the North.

I very largely support the former and unequivocally the latter. However, the EU poses increasing questions about how we will sustain a meaningful democratic engagement at home, while ever more important decisions are made in supra-national institutions in which we play only a small part abroad.

This diffusion of sovereignty, and watering down of the potency of democratic decisions at home have coincided with what is an astonishing national institutional dishevelment. For more than 20 years, one after another, nearly every pillar of the State has either combusted or shrivelled reputationally.

At the juncture when we repeatedly voted to pool our sovereign power, primarily with the EU, but also to an extent in North-South institutions, confidence in our own internal institutions, religious, social and political collapsed. In a larger scheme of things, the succession of Garda controversies and the commissioner’s resignation are just further pieces of debris falling from an already crumbling edifice.

Living through all this and having only a contested past for context we have difficulty making sense of, or even seeing a bigger picture. But there are enough signs to tell us that the accumulated dislocation experienced over the past 20 years is unprecedented in intensity since the period began by the election of the Liberal government in 1906 and ended by the foundation of the State in 1922. We are living through a time when tumultuous change is not so much being commemorated as being re-enacted.

Much of the truly consequential change we are experiencing, now as then, is technological or cultural. In pooling our sovereignty with other states aboard, we needed but spectacularly failed to strengthen our institutions at home. Simultaneously we both loosened traditional restraints and embraced new freedoms. Untied from religious restriction, and enabled by technological development, individual freedom comprehensively triumphed over any wider community responsibility.

The collection of individuals that we have become, ever less connected to one another by ties of mutual responsibility or necessity, has had the audacity to look power in the eye and find it wanting. In a sense the only wonder is that it took us so long. But the creation again in the future of new myths to replace discarded old ones with take much longer still. A hundred years ago mass democracy emerged, but old patterns of deference continued. Now deference is dead and, in Yeats’ words, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”. What we are living through is that great, continual falling apart.

There has been a lot of complaint about the democratic revolution we were promised but never had. But in complaining we have missed the point. There is a democratic revolution. It has been progressively withdrawn, if not acquiescence, certainly affirmation from most of the pillars of our society.

The progressive disembowelling of public credibility, of which Commissioner Callinan’s resignation is just another episode, cannot continue without an eventual convulsion. It had momentarily been supposed that convulsion had been the general election of 2011. Then we oversaw the third largest turnover of politicians in any parliamentary democracy since the Second World War. But it was not to be. Unprecedented change in personnel, brought unprecedented continuity in policy. Underpinning it all has been an unwavering commitment not to democratic revolution but renewed commitment to existing institutions already exhausted of credibility.

The problem at the heart of this week’s furore is essentially the same problem continuously re-enacted in religious orders, in board rooms, venerable charities, successive governments then Commissioner Callinan and still Mr Shatter. It is a culture of an inherently proprietorial exercise of power, which predates democracy, but continues on as an afterlife within it.

IN perpetuating that culture this Government cannot be surprised if Shatter ruled as if he would not have to account. Extraordinarily bright, but now beset, he embodies the authoritarianism that is the shared DNA of many of his cabinet colleagues. The accusation most damning of them is that they are the continuation of, and not a change from, the wider culture they swore to challenge and reform.

So it continues. Credibility and confidence are sapped; disillusionment increases. There is a lot to fret about and little that is clear to hope for. But in fact, though it may be decades in the making, profound change is probably irreversible.

This is a time of alarm — not just recovery. There is more in hand than simply balancing the books. The painful genesis of a new society requires vigilance and vision. The succession of crises we lament are perversely signs of life and of renewal. Each is a milestone. Layer by layer we are interrogating every assumption we took for granted. There is a great throwing-over of excess baggage. But at some point reconstruction must begin. New pillars of society must be erected. We are for now still above water, but hardly seaworthy.