IRELAND'S POLITICAL leaders must reclaim the Republic by asserting the national interest over sectional interest and personal greed, former president of the European Parliament Pat Cox said last night.
Mr Cox said public boards need to be subjected to public scrutiny prior to appointment and to full democratic accountability afterwards while public watchdogs must not only be vigilant but also effective in dealing with breaches.
"Our political and public institutions need to be renewed to make them fit for purpose and to give us hope for the times we live in. Change will carry a price but it should not be at the expense of the most vulnerable.
"We need less venality and better judgment in the higher reaches of our society. We need to afflict comfortable and cosy cartels and to comfort the afflicted more than has been our habit in recent years.
"Leadership based on good authority needs to be founded on sound judgment. This applies no less to the church than it does to other key actors," said Mr Cox, speaking at the centenary celebrations of the Irish province of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart in Cork last night.
Mr Cox recalled that the work of the Irish province extended from the searing summer heat of shanty towns in Venezuela to the freezing winters of the Caucasus in southern Russia to Aids pandemic in South Africa.
He cautioned that growing materialism in the form of consumerism was affecting everywhere, with people defining their identity more in terms of what they consume than what they do.
"We suffer from affluenza, the influenza of affluence," he said.
"Our debit balances, our endless commuting and traffic jams, higher stress, lower self-esteem, binge drinking, obesity, suicide and social isolation, especially of the socially vulnerable and the old, all bear testament to the flip side of our new found material success.
"Our sense of community, too, has paid a price as many previously active in the voluntary sector succumbed to a new poverty of the absence more of time than money," he said, adding that in today's more individualist society, the disadvantaged are more excluded than in the past.
Former superior general of the order Fr Michael Curran said that two of the many evils afflicting the world today were rejection of religion and religious extremism but that idealism grounded in religious faith offered hope to mankind.
Fr Curran said that the rejection of religion did not spring from the fact that the world had evolved into a secularism which tried to manage its business in a rational way without reference to God.
"This secularism is not necessarily inimical to religion. It can remain open to the exercise of true religion, to the transcendence of the human spirit and our relationship to the living God who speaks to us, invites us to believe and promises us life beyond death."
Fr Curran said that the absence of any reference to God in the proposed EU constitution drawn up by Valery Giscard d'Estaing some years ago had provoked much debate with many recognising that no one could be forced anymore to believe in God. "But there is an awakening sense of the need of something more than secular humanism to nourish the human spirit," said Fr Curran, citing how even some politicians such as Tony Blair have spoken of the need for an idealism grounded in religion.