It's just possible that the Public Accounts Committee into the DIRT escapade will finally end that persistent culture of conspiracy against the state; it's surely no coincidence that as this informal conspiracy is being wound up, another conspiracy, more formal, more organised and infinitely more deadly, that of the IRA against both Irish states, is similarly coming to an end.
Within the EU, within the world economy of free trade, within a recognition of the need for the rule of law, with the acceptance of the terms of a two-way contract between government and citizen, Ireland is walking away from its past more quickly than any of us would have thought possible even two years ago.
An old Ireland is dying in that immediate past. It is an Ireland of winks and nudges, of not what you know but who know; it is an Ireland where the most binding of public loyalties is not to the state but to movements to overthrow the state; it is an Ireland where honour is to be found in criminal conspiracy, and virtue in murder; it is an Ireland without respect for private law, personally enforced; it is an Ireland of pious display and covert vice; an Ireland in which the wife-beater is a daily communicant and the pillar-of-the-community bank manager swindles his less discerning customers.
Vampire in the sun
It is an Ireland which Yeats saw in its all diseased malignity, where the best lack all conviction, and the worst are full of passionate intensity. And though many of the ingredients of this Ireland predate Michael Collins, most especially the disregard for the rule of law and for a hearty preference for semi-licit deals in cute hoor-filled rooms, he was the formal architect of much of the Ireland which is visibly perishing, like a vampire being touched by the rising sun.
At one level it is extremely depressing that Michael Collins is being hailed as the Irish person of the century in this newspaper's Times 2000, for he is truly representative of the twin traditions which have caused this country so much pain: of laudable murder and of the secret deal. But at another, it is clear that what people are hailing is not the bloody and conspiratorial reality but the heroic myth of genius and peacemaker; and if intelligence and opposition to violence are publicly to be acclaimed, who can complain?
The Collins tradition of a few close men working out deals, bumping people off, being in the know, holding all the strings in their hands - that is not the tradition of the party which honours him. By culture and habit and worldview, Collins was not Fine Gael but Fianna Fail. The man who inherited his political and cultural mantle was the man he introduced to cold-blooded murder, Sean Lemass. It was Sean Lemass who ran Dev's governments by strokes and deals, who kept the Fianna Fail machine ticking over, who delivered the vote, and when the time came in the 1960s, was able to create a newly emergent middle class from party cronies.
And his heir was his son-in-law, Charles Haughey.
Sides of a coin
The two traditions, of fiscal conspiracy against the state, of jobs for the boys, of dodgy deals linking the civil service with the private sector, and of apparently virtuous, selfless armed conspiracy, co-existed as opposite sides of the same base coin: each made the other possible.
Why should people not cheat on their taxes? How is it possible for Charles Haughey to live like that if he is not up to some fiddle? And why not join Sinn Fein or the IRA? Do they not embody the noble ideals for which previous generations died, rather than the corrupt and swindling political masters which democracy has produced?
That coin had currency only so long as it circulated amongst the willing: once people grew aware of its worthlessness, it found fewer and fewer takers. For all that the tribunals have been vastly expensive exercises in inconclusiveness, their very existence exposed the quite astonishing levels of - as the expression goes - "non-compliance": i.e. criminality in the state. And it did not need a genius to see how politically unproductive violence was towards achieving its real end.
Lessons of democracy
Here we are, in the last few days of the century, and the lessons of the great democracies are finally beginning to be learnt and absorbed here in Ireland. Law counts. Respect for human life counts. Personal and private contracts count. Public honesty counts. Consistency counts. Standards count.
The general acceptance of these civic virtues does not mean rogues will not prosper. They always will. But now there is a code against which behaviour may be measured. It means that there are generally-accepted principles which inform private and public life, and that people will no longer tolerate as an acceptable feature of the political culture the existence of two different sets of standards, one of which is proclaimed on the hustings, its opposite honoured when deals are being struck.
So readers of this newspaper might well hail Michael Collins as person of the century; they are hailing a legend, not a reality. The central feature which he refined, and which lay at the heart of both paramilitary violence and economic fixes, was The Squad, the elite who alone were in the know. The Squad is finally, and deservedly, dying the death. Good riddance.