THE CONTROVERSY which preceded Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan delivering the Michael Collins oration yesterday was a reminder that, though civil war politics “may be on life support, it is still there”, Minister of State Dara Colleary told the Humbert School yesterday. “It was depressing,” he said.
In a wide-ranging address, he expressed regret that the Seanad did not have the power to impeach Ivor Callely, called for local government reform, criticised the increasing emphasis on personality rather than policy in reporting on politics, and said “the vast majority of politicians are decent people”.
The Minister with responsibility for public service reform said of the Michael Collins controversy that what depressed him most “were comments coming from young people”. It was time “we moved on”, he said.
He acknowledged that Fianna Fáil was “in the political fight of our lives. But we are good fighters”. Political analysis in Ireland had “become personality-dominated”, he said, pointing to the recent leadership debate in Fine Gael, where “no alternative vision of government” was presented as an example.
Another example was how a speech by Lucinda Creighton TD at the recent MacGill School was reported. “Two seconds” from that lengthy, in-depth address – in which she referred to a Fine Gael fund-raising golf classic attended by a developer – was run as the main item on RTÉ news that night, he said.
The second item was comments by Ombudsman Emily O’Reilly on how older people were being treated. He “would have felt older people were more important news”.
There had to be change in the financing of local government so councillors could be local governors. “Power now lies with unelected officials when it should be with the councillors,” he said.
He disagreed “fundamentally” with a description at the school last Friday of Ireland’s priests as “spineless”. Following publication of the Ryan and Murphy reports last year he had “seen the pain of priests at the pulpits”.
Delivering the Bishop Stock address in Killala Cathedral yesterday, the Church of Ireland Bishop of Tuam Richard Henderson said: “We are emerging, only slowly, into a fairer but in some ways scarier world where sickening secrets are being shouted from the rooftops and almost no one can rely any more on an inherited sense of assumed decency within authority and power.”
There was, he felt, “a disparity in the current revelations; as there has to be, in the time-scale of things. For now, the most powerful institutions, be they State, banks or church, are getting it first. And rightly, for there is much to be corrected.” But, he went on, “None of us is without sin”.
He had “repeatedly been sickened by seeing great people, who have made great contributions, hounded and humiliated, sometimes for one misdemeanour”. More generally and where the media was concerned “what is lacking is truth-telling about the middle ground”, he said.