ANY Irish person invited to comment on the state of the British national psyche at the present time needs to be aware of the pitfalls. It is not easy to be dispassionate when confronted by the spectacle of what was once the greatest empire in the world, which included us amongst its possessions, grappling with its transformation into a modest middle league player on the world stage.
It is as easy for us wilfully to misinterpret what is happening across the Irish Sea as it is for the British to misunderstand us. Indeed, it happens all the time. When I lived in Britain, as I did for 20 years, I often did not recognise the Britain I read about in Irish newspapers. Now I live in Ireland and British portraits of Ireland and the Irish seem to possess the same degree of inexactitude. So much for the global village.
So, take a handful of happenings across the water - violent (Dunblane, Jamie Bolger, the Wests, the Riding School, the call to bring back corporal punishment, Gascoigne) and sleazy (Fergie, Mellor, cash for questions, huge pay outs for senior managers). Season the mixture with a dash of Celtic cynicism and a pinch of vengeful satisfaction and the resultant stew exudes decay, degeneracy and demoralisation.
Britain, so the analysis goes, is psychologically past it, morally burned out, physically exhausted.
The temptation to contrast Ireland's feelings of success with Britain's pangs of failure is irresistible. Look at our rate of growth, we crow, how proud we are of Mary Robinson, how good it is to be Europeans and just think of the future when we are cashing our Euromark cheques from Skibbereen to Stuttgart. Meanwhile, the British lament their sluggish growth, are embarrassed by their leaders, wallow in insularity and observe the looming possibility of the Euromark with all the enthusiasm of a minor royal spotting a member of the paparazzi.
BUT to conclude on the basis of such an analysis that Britain is in some kind of unique moral crisis is akin to the British deciding on the basis of the X case, the beef tribunal, the murder of Veronica Guerin, and the incompetence of the Department of Justice that Ireland is a land of gombeens and crooks gripped by 19th century obscurantism and clerical fundamentalism. (Just such a conclusion was reached in that Daily Mail hatchet job and the Irish response, pace Padraig Flynn, was apoplectic).
Britain, like Ireland, is going through a transformation. But Britain's is particularly painful and it is slow. It has not been helped by the appalling neglect of primary and secondary education which occurred during the 1960s, a neglect for which contemporary Britain is paying an awesome price, and by the refusal of successive administrations to confront the profound class divisions that are such a corrosive feature of British society.
Together these have done much to create an underclass, a yob culture, alienated, rootless and violent, which makes an increasingly affluent middle class quake in its bed.
But here is where this analysis starts to become a mite uncomfortable. Are not many of Britain's ills - the high rate of marital breakdown, the fragmentation of the family, the alarming suicide rates of young, unemployed men, the tide of violence against women, the seeming decline in moral values, the contempt for community, the pursuit of self - are not these the very ills that also provoke us into lamentation and angst on this side of the Irish Sea?
A Scottish cardinal tackles a senior politician over his views on abortion, a senior politician muses on the reintroduction of corporal punishment, the Speaker of the House of Commons authorises an inquiry into political dishonesty and the newspapers bulge with accounts of road rage, rape and racial intolerance - sound familiar?
An Irish bishop questions the rush to modify our bail laws, an inquiry is ordered into incompetence in our Justice Department, our media report a litany of child abuse, incest and violent crime and whole communities march to protest at the spread of the drug culture in our inner cities.
HE moral debate that is under way in Britain is under way here, too.
it takes place within a context of national uncertainty and economic anxiety and, in consequence, it serves to accentuate and aggravate the atmosphere of national insecurity and self doubt. Our moral debate is conducted against a backdrop of economic exuberance and political chuzpah and, to an extent, seems more muted, even apologetic.
But the debate is the same. How do we marry economic growth and social justice? How do we preserve compassion while cultivating competition? How do we reconcile individual liberty and the common good? How do we ensure that it is the all round quality of a person's life - their spiritual, their psychological, their cultural life, as well as their economic life - that is the agenda and not just the upward march of economic indicators?
Some elements of the British debate on morality have figured in our own debate over the past 20 years - abortion, marital separation and divorce, the growing gap between the haves and the havenots, low standards of honesty in high places, a reluctance to take responsibility for actions.
Some elements appear intrinsic to Britain - the soul searching over education, euthanasia, the crisis in health care, the limits to artificial methods of enhancing procreation.
But the differences are not of substance. Both our societies are in crisis because Europe, to which we both belong, is in crisis. The challenges Britain faces, we face and Europe faces - unemployment, drugs, violence, materialism, a neglect of person in favour of profit, the slow, remorseless decline in religious certainties.
Tempting, therefore, though it may be to see Britain's current preoccupation with moral values and a moral crisis as something peculiar to a nation in decline, I believe it would be unwise. As Europeans we share more than the regional development fund and the CAP.
