Question: does this society have any moral centre, to which the majority of the population subscribes? Answer: Sixty per cent of Irish MEPs have signed on to claim a day's allowance for sitting in the European Parliament, but merely popped in before buzzing off home, writes Kevin Myers.
Question: Does that say much about Irish life? Answer: On its own, no, not until you consider that Irish senators, the most purposeless "legislators" since Caligula's horse, last year claimed over €2 million in expenses.
Question: Doing what?
Answer: Search me.
No, no doubt the MEPs are not breaking any rules when claiming an extra €262 for their brief appearances. But is that the point? They are being paid that extra per diem fee - perhaps what a check-out girl earns in a week - in addition to their Shergar-ransom salaries in order to participate in the running of European affairs.
The Irish MEPs defend their practice of claiming a full day's allowance after merely trying the Parliament doorway for neck-size, saying that this happens only after they have missed the last flight home the night before, and that they are merely claiming for the travel-time home.
That's fine. But other MEPs have to travel home on Fridays too, not just the Irish. Stockholm, Rome and Madrid are actually twice as far from Brussels as Dublin. Athens is nearly three times as far, as is Helsinki. Yet the figures show Irish MEPs have the highest rate of signing on and then promptly leaving in the EU - 60 per cent. The Finns clock in at 44 per cent, the Swedes at 36 per cent, the Spanish at 28 per cent, the Italians at 17 per cent, and the Greeks at only 8 per cent.
But actually, the high jinks of our More Expenses Please are as nothing compared with what members of the Oireachtas have been up to. It is many years - thank God - since I was in the Seanad, but I doubt whether things have perked up in that time. Back then, it had all the animation of the Bugs Moran gang after Al Capone's boys had popped their Thompsons back in their violin cases. Not a word was said which could in sense any sense have enriched the human race. No law was sharpened nor liberty defended, but at least in those distant, droning days, a Senator didn't cost much: about three groats a session.
That can't be said about the present Seanad. Senator Brendan Daly of Fianna Fáil last year claimed €91,413 in expenses. His additional salary as a Senator is a few pence shy of €60,000. He also draws €33,000 in pensions for his time as a Minister for State, a career so illustrious it has left not a molecule of memory in my brain to remind me of his many singular achievements.
This man is costing the State over €184,000 a year: and what do we get in return? Haven't a clue: not a bleeding clue.
He is not unique by any means, merely in the forefront of the baying expenses pack. Senator Rory Kiely claimed €84,000 in expenses, Paschal Mooney extracted €66,600 from the State to defray his expenses, and Labhras Ó Murchú received €62,000, just below the €63,400 claimed by Paddy Burke of Fine Gael. In all, the 40 senators claimed nearly €3 million in expenses. In "expenses", mind, whatever they are.
That's the Seanad. Over in the Dáil, the TDs made off with nearly €11 million in e-numbers. Many of these are, of course, for the running of their clinics, in which our elected representatives do their best to bend, subvert, corrupt, deprave, distort and undermine the laws of our land.
And you know what? Most of these creatures will be elected again at the next election, and those who don't make it will not fall simply because of their astounding expenses claims. As the electoral popularity of Michael Lowry and Beverley Cooper-Flynn shows, we live a polity which is almost wholly without any agreed ethical rules, one in which principle is a misspelt head teacher, and morality is merely political death, but without the tea.
Did my flesh alone creep at the cravenly respectful hearing the Dublin Chamber of Commerce gave Gerry Adams, the day after the Independent Monitoring Commission had reported on the hundreds of terrorist infringements of the ceasefires? Many of these were by the IRA, on the Army Council of which Gerry Adams has regularly sat.
It's one thing for Senator Mary White (Seanad expenses: nearly €24,000), who apparently has pipistrelles in her pantry, to cheer Gerry Adams like a teenage girl in the Westlife dressing room; quite another for the solemn and suited mandarins of Irish commercial life to listen to him with the reverential abasement of novitiate students attending the Pope. Could not even a single voice have mused aloud within their midst: and Jean McConville?
So in this greasy, crazy, moral-free State, who does Bertie Ahern get mad with? With Gerry Adams, a man intimately associated with IRA violence for 30 years, in ceasefire and otherwise, or Denis Bradley, the deputy chairman of the North's Policing Board, who alleged that the Government, in a fit of pique with Sinn Féin, had distanced itself from the peace process?
Who? Why, Denis Bradley of course. Because in this land of dogmatic and unprincipled pragmatism, the Taoiseach never shows even a whiff of pique towards terrorists or those who represent them, and by God certainly never gets angry with them. Ah, no: anger is reserved for democrats like Denis Bradley, for he is a safe target for such anger. He is an honest man.