CONNECT / Eddie Holt: Beverley Flynn, who, as an employee, promoted a National Irish Bank (NIB) tax dodge, blames the bank. Hers is a standard "only following orders" defence. Unacceptable at Nuremberg, it's not acceptable now either. However, it's not worthless. After all, many workers prosper through following orders that are questionable, ethically if not always legally.
Indeed, many employers and managers want their orders to be followed without question. Some even demand as much. So, within business, social and even voluntary organisations, it's usual for big bosses to expect smaller bosses not to query their instructions. In turn, the smaller bosses expect more junior workers to carry out their commands. And so it goes.
Is it, for instance, all right for bosses to instruct secretaries to lie for them? You know the nonsense. You ring up looking for Mr X to be told "he's in a meeting". Yeah, of course he is. (OK, it's possible but such a reply is often, maybe usually, a lie.) Not only is it deceit but frequently the secretary has been told by the boss to lie either to all callers or selected ones.
It would be interesting to hear about the fates of secretaries who told such bosses that they didn't "do" lies - that sort of thing wasn't part of the job spec. What would happen at say, the Labour Court, if a secretary complained that his/her boss required him/her to tell lies? Ought there not be a charge of "ethical harassment" as well as ones of sexual and racial harassment? Certainly, there are problems within labour relationships which can't be easily dismissed. Employees are often troublemakers and that must be acknowledged. But too regularly the world of work demands of people acceptance of practices and conditions they would never tolerate in other relationships. Beverley Flynn wasn't the only bank employee flogging tax dodges.
She's easily and rightly condemned, of course. Her ostentatious self-confidence seems hugely at odds with the dutiful little employee plea implicit in her defence. Furthermore, her father's smug and overweening self-regard has not endeared him or her to great numbers of people outside Co Mayo. Yet her defence, while unacceptable in itself, must complicate everybody's responses.
Otherwise, it's simply a matter of saying that you may be unethical but you mustn't act illegally or, even more pointedly, be caught acting or having acted illegally. (That's a wonderful message for young people about the value of individual human morality!) This latest Flynn case raises profound issues. Who should decide if a work order is to be followed or not? It appears from reaction to the case that if an order is illegal the onus is held to be upon the employee. If, on the other hand, an order is not illegal but its fulfilment requires breaching of a worker's personal ethics, objections to it are likely to hinder an employee's career prospects. So, the cute hoor response is to say "cop on - live in the 'real world' and it's only a little lie anyway".
This "real world" - wherein law matters hugely but personal morality is routinely derided by the cute hoors and their acolytes - is being made a prison. The problem, of course, is that there are always "realists" ready to carry out questionable instructions. To some people, such employees are thoroughly reasonable; to others they are simply lickarses. It's a subjective call.
Still, almost everybody knows that facilitating the hierarchy is the usual way to prosper in employment. Of course, it's often the right thing to do - fair-minded people, decent aims, common enterprise and all that. But a great deal of work is so competitive - between employees in the same outfit and between outfits in the same business - that inevitably corners are cut.
Competition is said to lead to "efficiency" and lower costs for customers. It can, but that's only part of its results. Inexorably, ethical guidelines are trashed in the push for profits. Look at, for instance, the state of some media with their "only giving the punter what he wants" ethos. Look at "no-frills" airlines. Look at banks and their "products" (a ridiculous use of the word).
In each of these cases, competition for profit - encouraged by the dominant ideology of our time - is so intense that the "real world" surrounding them has shrunk alarmingly. In fact, almost all that matters is profit. Certainly, such a world has very little regard for anything as namby-pamby as personal morality. That, "realists" insist, is just a luxury for saddos and malcontents.
Fair enough. But when does profiteering become unacceptable? Sure, we need a certain degree of dynamism and recognition that people aren't saints. Yet when scams to boost bank profits undo ties that bind communities by advising private people how to avoid contributing to the community, is that not an example of this so-called "real world" as a parasite on the real "real world"?
Of course it is.
Beverley Flynn, though the NIB scam intended the opposite, has paradoxically done the people some service.