Corruption in public life: We get the politicians we deserve

IT is one of the tragedies of modern Ireland that the outrage — and even shame for those who still cling to some sort of a moral compass — provoked by Monday night’s excellent RTÉ Investigates programme that uncovered corruption in several local authorities will be no more than a three-day wonder. 

Just like every other exposé of criminal behaviour in our public affairs it will provoke anger, indignation and some table-thumping demands for forceful measures to confront what now seems almost an inescapable cancer.

It is tragic too that this reaction has become as regular and destructive as winter flooding, a reaction that will inevitably be forgotten when Christmas festivities offer a welcome refuge from the everyday sleaze undermining this democracy. This passing bluster is the default reaction to every tribunal report, every process that uncovers low standards in high places but nothing changes.

People like the odious and heavily jewelled Monaghan county councillor Hugh McElvaney — until very recently a feted Fine Gael Brahmin — are left free to abuse their position and shake down anyone hoping to do business in what they seem to regard as their personal fiefdom. In another context this behaviour would be known as a protection racket.

The usual platitudes suggesting that the great majority of politicians of all hues are decent, hard-working and committed public representatives will be dusted down and offered to a public weary to the bones of a deep official indifference to corruption — as much by inaction as by action. And of course most politicans are decent but it would be far more reassuring if this majority, this civic minded, caring and supposedly trustworthy cohort had given expression to their virture by enacting the kind of legislation that would give teeth to those who would confront the corruption exposed by reporter Conor Ryan on Monday night. Rather, they have presided over the emasculation, the utter dilution to the point of irrelevance, of the recommendations made by the Mahon Tribunal in July 2012 when it reported that it found “endemic and systemic” corruption in Irish political life. When steel was required the decent majority funked it and offered little more than patronising hot air.

When the the tortuously long Mahon process concluded, the Government — Enda Kenny’s Government, the one elected with an unprecedented mandate for reform — promised to establish an independent planning regulator to put planning beyond the reach of politicians. That regulator was to have the power to investigate and pursue those it suspected of being corrupt. How naive we were to hope that a Rubicon had been finally crossed and that real efforts would be made to confront corruption. Three years later nothing has changed and is very unlikely to change before the looming election. What does that say about the decent majority in the Oireachtas? The decent, civic-minded, hard-working ones we are assured have nothing but the highest standards and ambitions? Bah humbug.

Political corruption cannot exist in isolation. It is a symptom of a corrupt society that regularly elects candidates who have been found to be far less than wholesome. Michael Lowry is a regular poll topper in Tipperary and despite the Mahon Tribunal’s finding that he abused his position. He remains very close to senior Government figures. Taoiseach Enda Kenny feels able to joke about readmitting him to Fine Gael. Mr Kenny also seems unpreturbed that his cosiness with Denis O’Brien suggests that the Mahon findings are an irrelevance. And Bertie Ahern won the money on the horses. This culture cannot be because of a lack of awareness so it must be indifference to, or even something less attractive — like contempt — for an electorate who might aspire to high or even basic standards in public life.

At the moment, and in parallel to this stone-turning, we have a debate about school patronage and whether or not the Catholic Church’s control of over 90% of our national schools should be curtailed . Those who oppose change argue that the Church has led the moral formation of this society. If that is the case then Monday’s relevations point to an other failure for that institution, one obsessed by controlling sexuality to the exclusion of almost all other forms of morality and human behaviour. But the greatest tragedy remains that as an election approached we are more concerned about cutting a few cents from the USC than we are about corruption.

Yes, we truly get the politicians we deserve.