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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
— March - April 2012
leader
E
nda Kenny got into trouble by over-gener-
alising on the sensitive issue of just who
went mad with greed and borrowing dur-
ing our distant boom, but he might just
as well have gone the whole way and questioned
which of us dabbled in corruption too.
Corruption, illegal and legal, has been endemic
in banking, in the awarding of public contracts,
in planning, in the exploitation of resources and
the environment, in the unblinking repayment
of unsecured bondholders and ultimately in the
obscene maldistribution of wealth.
Ireland is regarded as suffering particularly
high levels of ‘legal corruption’ – perhaps as many
(not you dear reader or I, of course) need to look
into their souls to see if they have been party
to corruption as need to see if they are party to
greed.
While no laws may be broken, ‘strokes’ and
‘cute hoorism’ such as nepotism, patronage, job-
bery, parochialism, political favours and political
donations influence political decisions and policy
to the detriment of the common good, dispropor-
tionately in this country. Influence-selling has yet
to be completely outlawed, while political funding
remains open to abuse through loose thresholds
on political donations and weak disclosure criteria
for political parties. Though legislation is pro-
posed, political lobbying is entirely unregulated
and political parties are not required to publish
audited accounts.
Disgrace bears little consequence in this soci-
ety. Ben Dunne still has a weekly column in the
Irish Sun, although Moriarty found him corrupt
and his principal defence seems to be that he had
psychiatric difficulties. Bertie Ahern batted for the
Star from behind the contents of a refrigerator and
Celia Larkin pontificates on the issues of the day
in the Sunday Independent. No-one cares what
Moriarty said about civil servants. Denis O’Brien
still dominates our Global Economic Forums, the
Clinton Diaspora Summit and the horrible Ireland
Inc St Patrick’s Day NYSE bell-ringing.
Whatever about the benighted Fianna Fáil,
our current main ruling party raised, with cor-
rupt Minister Michael Lowry’s involvement, €.
million to clear its debts between and
and, despite that and an army of dodgy rezoning
councillors, most of whom were recognised in
the Mahon Report, it rose to political ascendancy
last year as if it were a paragon of virtue. There
was, and is, no sign of criminal proceedings
for corruption against Haughey, Burke, Lowry,
O’Brien, the Bailey Brothers or Liam Lawlor.
Michael Lowry, Ray Burke, Ivor Callely, George
Redmond, Liam Cosgrave Jnr, Frank Dunlop – that
galaxy of unworthiness – all retain their govern-
ment pensions. Government promises to address
Mahon recommendations and seek prosecutions
are as tenuous as the forgotten pledges it gave
after Moriarty.
Village likes to look at human progress in
terms of four spheres that comprise human activ-
ity – economic, social, environmental and cultural.
On probably all, certainly on three, we live in a cor-
rupt society, morally and often legally.
Economically, Ireland Inc (that well-worn
if emasculated phrase!) turns out to believe in
bailing out people who were paid excessively for
taking risks and then avoided responsibility when
the risks went wrong. This reveals as insincere
the very premise of the capitalism it purported
to believe in. In this respect if you have to do
capitalism, it is better to do it the US way with
competition and swift criminal penalties for
dishonesty.
In Ireland, we failed to regulate, even to main-
tain functioning capitalism, let alone to facilitate
an equal and sustainable society. And from the
Beef Tribunal to the Moriarty Tribunal to the
Planning Tribunal and various insipid banking
inquiries as well as in cases involving insider trad-
ing, public tendering and the whole planning
process, it is clear that there is widespread red-
toothed corruption tainting important sectors of
our economy and reaching right to the top; as well
as ubiquitous ‘trading in influence’.
During the boom all the main parties promoted
or went along with a tax-reducing, officiary-over-
remunerating agenda and the now-ruling parties
supported insane stamp-duty reductions. If not
corrupt this was at least unfair and reckless. The
biggest recent instances of economic corruption
are repaying largely foreign plutocrats with their
unsecured bonds and Nama‘s decision in most
cases to retrieve not the original value of loans,
but the haircut price it paid, so losing the poten-
tial upside benefit to the taxpayer; and revealing it
as sustaining burnt-out speculators when we were
expressly promised it would not. Predictably too,
NAMA pays some of them up to €, a year
to run their troubled companies.
Socially, budgetary policy favours expenditure
cuts which affect the poorest most and taxation
policy favours the rich. Even during the boom we
had very low public expenditure relative to income,
On Mahon and Irish corruption
As Mahon finally grinds to a somewhat disappointing report, it is time to recognise
that corruption, even more than its cousin greed, did for Ireland in our time
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Judge Alan Mahon
leading to unnecessarily poor public services
and quality of life. During the boom there were
famously more Irish golf courses than playgrounds
(the Great Recession will have taken care of more
of the former than the latter). And there is a cer-
tain corruption in the structuring of society to
suit the rich and make equality between people,
who are equal moral agents, impossible. The CSO
recently showed that the average income of those
in the top per cent of the population was ½
times higher than the average of those in the poor-
est per cent. A year earlier it had been just .
times higher. The Gini coefficient which measures
income inequality more comprehensively was .
in , a disimprovement from . in
(when Sweden’s, for example, was .). Much
other corruption derives from this social inequality.
And as for the Left campaigning against the idea of
property taxes, this magazine despairs.
E
nvironmentally, during the boom we had
the highest resource-use per capita in
the EU and the second-highest green-
house gas emissions in the EU after
Luxembourg. Though emissions have dropped
from to tonnes per capita this is due to the
economic fiasco not good administration. Ireland
has played the fullest role in international climate
crimes.
Our water quality should be excellent due to
demography and geography. In fact E coli levels in
Ireland are seven times those of Northern Ireland
and times those of England and Wales (and
our chosen antidote of chlorination now offers
carcinogenic THMs in the drinking water of an
extraordinary – and unknowing – ,
citizens). Yet septic-tank inspections, mandated
by the EU were recently described by protesters
from Galway West, as “an injustice to rural peo-
ple . . . an insult”. And Environment Minister, Phil
Hogan, recently boasted that the new septic tank
inspection regime would cover only ten per cent of
houses near rivers and lakes. The debate on septic
tanks proceeds on the basis that there is no value
to the public in clean water. It is left to the EU to
see the policy point; and the public interest.
We never had the appetite for good planning.
The National Spatial Strategy was deliberately
made toothless. And local authorities ignore it –
as well as their own local plans, allowing Dublin
for example to sprawl into surrounding counties;
while cities and towns outside Greater Dublin lan-
guish. Around % of the State’s housing output
is built in the least sustainable form – one-off.
Since , , new one-off houses have
been permitted in Ireland. Despite this there is a
conspiracy to make out that the national spatial
problem is the difficulty of obtaining permissions
for one-off houses.
We have failed to learn the lessons of the
Planning Tribunal which have been evident for a
decade and a half. While codes of conduct and leg-
islation aimed at curbing corruption are in place
for public representatives and officials, there
appears to be little understanding and repeated
transgression of the codes at national and local
level.
Politicians have not learnt the clear lesson that
Development and other Plans need to be assessed
quasi-judicially, at the time of creation, for com-
pliance with the National Spatial Strategy. Mahon
recommends this only for decisions that counter
managements’ advice. In local government, the
risk of fraud and corruption is particularly acute,
heightened by the lack of adequate safeguards not
just against planning corruption, but against false
accounting, misuse of resources, influence-selling
and fraud also.
Culturally, our contemporary artists have not
held a mirror to our corrupt society. Too few of
them have made targets of our ruling elite, too
many of them seek the company of the wealthy
and the corrupt. Ireland is the capital of the boy
band and Eurotrash. Colm Tóibín’s celebration of
Michael Fingleton, Bono’s exaltation of capitalism
and cultivation of Blair, Bush and Ahern, Seamus
Heaney’s attendance at a Denis O’Brien dinner
find no parallels in the worlds of Joyce, Beckett
or Yeats. Aosdána is the smuggest colloquium in
cultural history. Jedward.
Transparency International’s Corruption
Perceptions Index shows that Ireland’s
ranking has fallen recently and it now compares
poorly to other northern European nations.
Ireland ranks out of countries with a score
of . out of ten, down from in . The cul-
ture of this country facilitates influence-selling
and is indulgent of corruption, even in high places.
That the national edifice should have collapsed
was inevitable.
It is this infection mixed with a largely unadul-
terated celebration of greed, rather than our mere,
derivative, fiscal come-uppance and debt, that will
keep this country down for a generation. Greed
and Corruption are each rooted in base defer-
ence to money and self, rather than the public
interest.
Without a change in culture we are doomed.
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