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48 — village July - August 2012
Öʽ®ã®Ý
Political Corruption in Ireland
1922-2010. A Crooked Harp?!
by Elaine Byrne
Manchester University Press
Paperback, 224pp
€15.99
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P
OLITICAL corruption is big business
in Ireland. The Mahon Report stated,
admittedly hyperbolically, that “cor-
ruption in Irish political life was endemic
and systemic, affecting every level of government”.
Now the issue has its first important book and its
champion.
Elaine Byrne is one of Ireland’s feistiest and
best-informed forces for transparency and eth-
ics in politics and she is only thirty-three. She
teaches Comparative Political Reform in Trinity
College Dublin, though she’s also something of
an activist, including for a lengthy time with Fine
Gael. She claims she helped all the political parties
with their exciting reform agendas at the general
election, she’s worked for the UN, the World Bank,
Transparency International and Global Integrity
and she plays Gaelic football. Her Irish Times arti-
cles on Iceland’s citizens’ assembly culminated
in the We the Citizens
initiative which she
considers proved that
deliberative democracy
works, though some
may think it proves
mostly that deliberative
democracy initiatives
can be irrelevant.
She’s a tenacious
contributor to radio
and television, though
she has noted “this can
depend on who owns
the media these days”.
For instance, Denis
O’Brien’s been in legal
correspondence with
her over her meanness
about him and the ESAT Licence. What harm?
Byrne is always entertaining, opinionated and
sparkily quirky: it is typical of her humour that
she calls this book after the harp, symbol of all
that needs strings pulled.
Elaine Byrne is the sort of academic who
has ‘mentors’, one of whom wrote her Foreword.
Although, she insists on saying, “older men don’t
get on with her very well” (she once accused
Éamon Dunphy of being “middle-aged”), the
prevalence of the usual blazered sixty-something
media academics in the acknowledgements sec-
tion of the book and indeed at the recent launch of
her book suggests they at least don’t ignore her.
Byrne’s task is to document if there has been
a decline in standards “since the inauguration of
Irish independence in 1922 to [sic] the loss of
economic sovereignty in 2010”. At risk of spoiling
it I can tell you now the answer is Yes. Recklessly
creating a hostage, she says her central thesis is to
challenge the conventional definition of corrup-
tion which is the abuse of public power for private
gain, a formula which, especially when interpreted
broadly, many think has stood staunchly up to
scrutiny. Citing John Noonan’s definitive study on
bribery she says in fact what is corrupt depends
on history and culture. Although it is, despite 273
pages, in fact difficult to understand precisely
what Byrne understands by corruption, in effect
she seems to believe it is not a (transcendent)
moral concept but a legal concept, and a moral
concept that must be understood with reference
to the morals of the time. Her case studies will
show, she says, the dangers of “an outdated [could
it be she actually means ‘hind-sighted’?] under-
standing of ethical transgressions”. But do they
really? Surely the proper standard for defining
corruption is the most progressive current one. In
a world of inequality and catastrophic unsustain-
ability it is necessary to appraise or judge actions
of all sorts, especially dysfunctional actions such
as corruption.
But Byrne repeatedly states that corruption
is an evolving concept. She offers the belief that
“what is unethical to one culture may be socially
acceptable in another… The political culture and
context of the period under scrutiny deters a value
neutral contemporaneous appraisal”. Confusingly
for someone who is against ‘value-neutral con-
temporaneous appraisal’ she also purports to be
against cultural relativism – presumably because
Crooked harp
Elaine Byrne takes the historical perspective on
political corruption in Ireland
The reluctance
to consider
‘why’
undermines
this important
and ambitious
book
¨
49
it sounds good to be against it. In dismissing the
view that there is no obligation to learn from the
past, she seems to be open only to the impor-
tance of learning how past corruption occurred,
not why: “Such intellectual paralysis can be cir-
cumvented by studying how corruption evolved
and developed as it did, in order to understand
the rationale for why it occurred. A descriptive
case study analysis focuses on the context of an
incident which allows the reader to evaluate how
such behaviour occurred without imposing any
obligation to make the judgement why”.
The reluctance to consider ‘why’ undermines
the comprehensiveness of this important and
ambitious book. At one point she notes that “the
political will to address the discrepancies of the
1963 Planning Act was absent. The Attorney
General’s clear advice on conflict of interest in
1974 was ignored while other legislation on ethics
was repealed”. Regrettably she does not apply her-
self to the reasons why. In this case she might have
looked no further than an old-fashioned favouring
of vested interests over the public interest.
Byrne does not really focus on the sociological
reasons for Ireland’s culture of corruption until
late in the book: when she briefly moots antipathy
to British rule leading to lack of faith in institu-
tions and rules; personalism; deferentiality due
to class, the church and the closed nature of eco-
nomic power. Elsewhere she notes the reluctance
of Irish people to vilify behaviour that promotes
the interests of family rather than self.
As to another well-known reason - personal
motivation - her theoretical fetish for history-cen-
tredness, which dictates the logic and direction of
the book, often leaves her floundering on moral
questions: “the ethical dimension of wrongdo-
ing hinders objective analyses because any such
scrutiny is suggestive of a judgmental and self-
righteous undertone”. Worse still it subverts
Byrne’s coherence and consistency as a com-
mentator. Her method and the views it spawns
undermines the visceral views she typically brings
to the media debate where, like most of the intelli-
gentsia - certainly whenever anyone shoves a pen
or a microphone in her direction - she seems to
judge people by the transcendent standard she
derides - and scrupulously eschews - in the book.
For example, an article by Byrne in the Sunday
Independent in March begins: “The McCracken,
Moriarty and Mahon tribunals showed, beyond
doubt, that Charles J Haughey, Albert Reynolds
and Bertie Ahern were morally bankrupt”.
She also once got into a famous argument with
Vincent Browne on his television show in which
she berated him for not taking a moral stance on
corruption, over Haughey, for example. Hold onto
your moral compass for the following exchange.
Byrne: “You seem to be less than sure about your
own opinion about Michael Lowry. Do you think
that he’s not profoundly corrupt? Do you have
a doubt about his ethical, moral character?” To
which a phosphorescent Browne retorts: “I don’t
make judgments about people’s moral character;
unlike you, I don’t make judgments about any-
body’s moral character”.
Not alone is she selling herself short by favour-
ing the historical/cultural interpretation over “the
ethical dimension” in the book but she also in fact
takes an ethical stance herself in the media, but
the wrong ethical stance. Byrne fails to recognise
the difference between taking a moral stance on
an individual and taking a moral stance on the
actions of an individual. There are ways of criti-
cising ethics without judging the perpetrator of
the unethical act and there are utilitarian rea-
sons for condemning corruption, including that
it militates against the common good, efficiency,
welfare-maximisation, fairness, equality and sus-
tainability. Byrne misconstrues the provenance of
morality which does not necessarily depend on
God or other forces for righteousness. For exam-
ple it is of the essence of the egalitarian ethic that
all humans are treated as of equal moral value,
though of course egalitarianism judges acts of
inequality – such as corruption - harshly.
The obscurity of the logic she pursues in the
book exacerbates the confusion on ethics. So,
for example, she writes that “the moral costs
of disreputable transgressions increased as the
probability of being discovered by a more inquisi-
tive media was more likely”. A more conventional,
serviceable, view is that immorality and moral
costs do not in any way depend on being discov-
ered, ex post facto. And she believes that “what
is corrupt today may be the kernel of tomorrow’s
norms and vice versa”. The kernel? This seems so
pessimistic that it is unlikely she can have meant
it.
While she fails to prove her central definitional
thesis and founders on the rocks of ethical theory,
Byrne succeeds wildly in filling her book with per-
sonally unearthed nuggets of ethical profligacy.
Byrne sets out her tent over eight chapters
using a good smattering of history punctuated by
case studies. She is going to be concerned with the
political culture that underpinned individual scan-
dals. (Though she refers learnedly to myths dating
as far back as the twelfth Century, frustratingly
her English publishers seem to have restricted the
Victims of history?
50 — village July - August 2012
Öʽ®ã®Ý
original 200-year period she scrutinised in the
university doctoral thesis on which the her book
is based, to 92 years.) Nevertheless in passing
she notes that blatant bribery by the king’s agents
of Irish MPs led to the Act of Union and that the
quid pro quo of a large political donation by Cecil
Rhodes to Parnell in 1888 was Parnell’s support
for measures that would constitute a precedent to
help him become Prime Minister of the Cape.
She writes that the legacy of the Union was a
lack of trust in the political classes, evidenced in
old Sinn Féin’s finding in 1919 that the Union had
facilitated four artificial famines and 27 partial
famines, for example. On the other hand there
was a dangerous deference and ultimately a con-
servatism generated by enthusiasm for the new
State. Like much of Southern Europe the state was
less important than the clan and was fair game to
be exploited; politicians were underqualified; and
there was little ideology.
She finds little corruption 1900-1930, a
period of meritocratic governmental standard-
setting, up to the 1950s when a crossroads was
reached and mis-taken, leading to golden circles
of aggrandised self-made men from the 1980s,
badly-handled deregulation, privatisations and
the tribunals which perhaps inevitably followed
in the 1990s.
In the first half of the twentieth century she
considers stifling over-regulation evoked frustra-
tion leading to occasional corruption: “the Great
Southern Railways, Ward and Locke Tribunals of
the 1940s were, in some measure, due to the nar-
row restrictions placed on domestic industry by
the ‘Control of Manufacturing Acts 1932-4’”.
Her belief that “the ethical dimension of
wrongdoing hinders objective analyses because
any such scrutiny is suggestive of a judgmen-
tal and self-righteous undertone” opens her to
laxity, almost to the point of justifying corrupt
behaviour, particularly that of frustrated cap-
italists. She has the “hard-nosed generation of
the 1960s” (“property developers, beef barons
and financiers”) seeking to “cultivate network
capital” and “thereby challenge assumed rights
to economic power’ such as those of “incumbent
influence which had historical and formal ties to
the state and therein substantial advantages”. She
pushes all this to a horrible (il)logical conclusion:
“because entry to the market was intrinsically une-
qual, alternative and innovative action such as a
policy of state capture, was regarded by some as
a justified strategy”. Byrne should be making it
clear at this point that any such justification was
ethically nuts. Instead she goes on to quote, with
apparent approval, the view that “the growth of
corruption is closely linked with the growth of
some of the activities of the government in the
economy”. Certainly it provided opportunities
but, unless we accept a moral vacuum, it does not
explain it. She knows that.
Byrne does come down in her last chapter,
indeed her last line, with the view that “Ireland’s
loss of economic sovereignty in 2010... may yet
motivate Irish political life to engage in state-
building and reimagine [sic] Irish society with
an emphasis on the moral duties of citizenship”.
But, in part because the precipitous decrease
in tolerance of hoorisms of all sort post-dated
her cut-off date of 2010, Byrne is not clear on
why the political culture in the end has perhaps
embraced the need to address corruption, as the
energetic scraping of the current government
suggests it may finally have done (or at least finally
be pretending to have done). My own view is that
political acceptance by the corruptible big par-
ties of corruption as anathema has been largely
unenthusiastic. In recent times any acceptance
reflected primarily a desire at the upper reaches of
Fianna Fail to deflect, at any cost, from immediate
scrutiny of the affairs of several of its leaders. The
easiest bone to throw to the baying, if not partic-
ulary dynamic or imaginative, media was reform.
Bertie Ahern didn’t even understand what eth-
ics meant – famously telling an interviewer with
pride “I might have appointed somebody but I
appointed them because they were friends, not
because of anything they had given me”. For some-
one with that mentality instigating a tribunal was
a better option than having to justify yourself to
the media. That Fianna Fáil voters haven’t minded
corruption has been suggested by Seán McGraw,
quoted by Byrne, who considers that “Fianna Fáil
loyalists may indirectly enjoy the benefits of influ-
ence-peddling or other questionable practices,
as a result of engaging precisely these practices”.
Fine Gael hasn’t been that different. Its ascetic
Minister for Justice, Alan Shatter, may take a more
stringent stance but his party, in government, has
yet to implement any of the recommendations of
the Moriarty Report, its leader was until recently
happy to cavort with both Michael Lowry and
Denis O’Brien, it fails to face up to the legacy of
Michael Lowry’s dubious if effective fundraising
for it and it regards Olivia Mitchell, for example,
as a political rather than an ethical problem. A cul-
ture of impunity, legal and, as Denis O’Brien can
testify moral and social, prevails. Byrne never
gets at this.
The book is unfortunately let down by ubiq-
uitous typological errors and misuse of words
– too many to list. Many of these are ludicrous
and someone probably needs to consider their
position, professionally. There isn’t much excuse
for “In procession of insider information”. Nor
is it nice to print “gowth was more than double
than that of our neighbours”. Or to write Denis
O’ Brien, the “Corkyman” who in many ways is a
“synonymous” public figure. Berkeley’s phrase was
‘esse est percipi’ not esse is percipi’. The bibliogra-
phy confounds Rísteard Mulcahy for “Roistered”
Mulcahy which would be quite different. In the
hands of Manchester University Press a Tribunal
can be a “ribunal”. Sometimes Byrne writes drivel:
“Chapter 4 makes the case that discretionary
political decisions, made under the cloak of eco-
nomic protectionalism [sic], were replaced by
the authorisation of planning permission in the
1950s, 1960s and 1970s”. Discretionary politi-
cal decisions have a far wider ambit than planning
permissions and so one could never replace the
other. She writes that “the Beef Tribunal of Inquiry
was perhaps the most extraordinary political epi-
sode in modern Irish history”. Sadly, it certainly
was not. At one stage in this 2012 book she pre-
dicts the tribunals will end in 2011; elsewhere she
says she is writing in 2010, another point when
her editor seems to have deserted her. Indeed, that
the book ends before publication of the Moriarty
(though she refers to it desultorily) and Mahon
reports, which could most elegantly have circum-
scribed it, suggests some sort of dysfunctional
relationship with the publisher which may under-
pin some of the problems of the book.
Anyway we can forgive her that. Byrne, on the
page as in reality, is never other than lively; never
less than fair and never more than concise.
McDowell launches Byrne’s book
