Where does the power in this country reside? In the hands of the Roman Catholic Church? Or in that other profession which also favours a white stock and black ceremonial robes - the Bar? After all, barristers for so long used to debate the interpretation of laws which were only made possible with the approval of the Catholic Church.
No country in Europe, apart from Spain and Portugal, allowed the Catholic Church the power it possessed in free Ireland. Its authority oozed unquestioned through the institutions of the State. NUI colleges rote-taught official Catholic theology as the only theology, and refused to serve meat in their canteens on Fridays. Contraception was outlawed, and customs officers seized condoms and copies of Playboy magazine from incoming tourists. Welcome to Saudi Hibernia.
However, there was one difference between here and Iberia. The authority of the Catholic Church in Spain and Portugal depended on the dictatorships of Franco and Salazar. But the extraordinary power of the Irish Catholic Church was exercised through a democracy. What people had was what they voted for; and even if the power of the Church was gross and intrusive, they repeatedly gave their assent to it.
So, is it surprising that hierarchies thus empowered became arrogant and indifferent to other people's feelings? Is this not what power does? Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make proud; and there would be a lot of pleasure to be got from seeing the mighty Catholic Church fallen, if the issue of child abuse were not so terrible. For there is no starker issue of black and white than this: powerful local representatives of an almost all-powerful church raping and buggering their way through their innocent charges.
Patrick Hughes
But our knowledge of this is not new. Seven years ago, this newspaper reported at length on the scandal of the priest and pederast Patrick Hughes, who through the mid-1970s raped and committed grossly perverted sexual attacks on an altar boy. When the Catholic Church discovered what Hughes had been doing, he was sent off to the US for his own safety. Naturally, it did not report the crimes to An Garda Síochána, nor was any limitation placed on Hughes's access to children in the US.
But we knew all this in 1995. The Irish Times file on this creature, and others like him, is bulging. The State could have acted against him and them and enforced its will on the Catholic Church at any time since then. So why not? The information needed was broadly available. Why does is take a television programme seven years later to prompt the anger which should properly have erupted in the mid-1990s?
Is it because now the Catholic Church is down, and is easy to kick? Is the legendary heroism of the mob once again in evidence? The mob nearly kicked the innocent nun Nora Wall to death, and would have done but for some extraordinary good luck. Now, howling, it is demanding access to all files, all records, as if any organisation could submit to such total intrusion.
Wigs, not mitres
And what is the weapon of choice to be used against the Church? Not the law-makers, who have, with gallant resolve, passed the buck every time it came into their hands, but the legal profession, with all the plenipotentiary powers it has acquired through the tribunals of recent years. Effortlessly have the wigged ones slipped into the positions of power vacated by the mitred ones. Effortlessly do they dispense it, and with the same effortless authority as once the bishops did; and like the bishops, they are not questioned for what they do.
People are right to rage at the Catholic Church, its pomps, its brutalities and its self-serving lies. But how is it possible that they do not rage at the conduct of its successors, the legal profession? Look at what the law has just been able to extract from a meek and obliging Government. The daily rate for senior counsel before the Moriarty Tribunal has just increased by €800 to €2,500 a day, to match the rate of the new Morris Tribunal into Garda corruption in Donegal. Junior counsel attending Moriarty - which might well include youngsters fresh from their bar exams - will earn €2,000 a day. The Flood Tribunal will now pay its seniors €2,250 a day, and its juniors €1,500.
The tribunals have become millionaire factories, and are set to last for years. But of course, full participation in a tribunal by no means excludes barristers from other jobs - such as, for example, doing insurance work, which, with the further fees extracted by the monopoly that is the Incorporated Law Society, accounts for half the cost of your motor insurance.
So there the legal profession sits, at the centre of power in Ireland, where scandals, political cowardice and law converge, extracting vast fortunes from the insurance industry and from the State simultaneously. Oh, nobody ever became a barrister in order to be poor.
State complicity
What is outrageous is the complicity of the State in this nonsense, and what is sad is the abject acquiescence of the electorate towards it, for this is their money. Resources which go towards barristers' second homes - their villas in Tuscany or their mansions in Provence - mean that this money is not going into a life-saving oncology unit in the West. And this truly is a scandal.
Religion was once the opiate of the people, and its priests grew fat on indulgences. Now the tribunal is the opiate, its priests growing fatter still on quite another kind of indulgence.