On Mahon and Irish corruption

 —  March - April 2012

leader

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