The Nice debate - such as it is - seems largely to depend on the notion that Ireland is a morally superior country, charged with some earthly mission to raise up mankind by the sheer power of its neutrality.
This used to be one of the most kinetic elements of Irish Catholicism: bizarrely, this absurd conceit lingers most strongly within those quarters that were once so pilloried by the Catholic Church: the left-liberal-republican constituency. Maybe that is the nature of all conflict: enemies end up resembling each other, mirror-dancing according to mutually understood rules and shared pieties.
Singular role
How is it possible for anyone in this country to talk about Ireland's singular role in the world without exploding in mirth and pebble dashing the walls with their upper intestines? What is our singular role? Is it State servants fatally infecting the most vulnerable in our society with contaminated blood? Is it politicians on the take? Is it a subsidised beef industry which systematically looted the purse of the public which had first subsidised it? Is it a scheming ruling caste which existed in a tax-free zone whose co-ordinates coincide strangely with the Cayman Islands? Or is it an electorate which largely knew of the broad brushstrokes of the lawlessness and the depravities which distinguished Irish life, and which approved of them?
Liam Lawlor, Raphael Burke, Charles Haughey, Michael Lowry: these creatures were not genetically modified Martians parachuted onto us, to seize and hold the vital bridgeheads of Irish life. They were the unspeakable parodies who were freely elected because of what they were and what they did. Charles Haughey, in particular, was chosen by an electorate not because it was ignorant of the corrupt things he did, and not despite those things, but because of them.
And were that odious reptile to return to political life today, the only stumbling block to re-election would probably be the allegations that he embezzled money intended for the liver transplant for his dear, dear friend, his closer-than-brother, the late Brian Lenihan. Otherwise all of his depradations would probably be applauded - many of them, no doubt, as yet unrecorded by the scribbling quills of our tribunals.
Guided tour
Nor was it all Haughey. Twenty years ago or more, a local man in Swords gave me a guided tour of the township, providing detailed allegations about Ray Burke's role in securing planning permission for developers, and the, ah, political donations which old greasebelly was receiving with an uncanny synchronicity in return. I asked: Who knows about this in Swords?
My informant laughed: Everybody. That's why Burke is so popular here. He's pulling one over the system, and making a few quid out of it, and so he gets re-elected. I asked if my informant could prove any of these allegations. Only if we got the builders to give evidence before a sworn inquiry - and if I wrote an article about it, wouldn't there be a sworn inquiry? No there wouldn't, I told him, rather coldly - just the largest libel action in the history of the Irish state, one magazine bankrupted, and one exjournalist tootling a penny whistle on Grafton Street.
Almost no-one voting for these wretches, or Liam Lawlor or Michael Lowry, would have been unaware of what, in broad strokes, they were doing; and in broad strokes, their electors approved. The politicians were cute hoors. And what is the term to describe an elector who approves of cute hoordom? Imbecile, cretin, half-wit, dolt, fool, amadan, perhaps? Now comes the hard bit. Quadrenially, we hear the self-congratulatory cant about the intelligence and the subtlety of the Irish electorate, as it moves its party-preferences around with the dazzling speed of a brilliant high-roller in Las Vegas playing half-adozen games of poker simultaneously.
This is rubbish. Irish electors are every bit as stupid as electors anywhere, and often a damned sight more stupid. How could the Lawlors, the Burkes, the Lowrys of this land otherwise have been elected? How else could a contemptible poser like Haughey have made it to first minister, visibly corrupt, visibly venal and posturingly preposterous throughout?
Clean hands
Who then or now, in political life in Ireland, has clean hands? Who had no knowledge of what the prime political villains were doing? Who is completely innocent? Who in the upper reaches of Fianna Fail can honestly declare that they were confident about the probity of any of its senior decision-makers? Who in Fine Gael can say in all frankness that they had no idea what Michael Lowry was up to?
In other words, if you subtracted those tainted by association or passive complicity in the corruption of the past 20 years from the leadership of political life in Ireland, you would be left with, well. . .Sinn Fein. And that virtuous ensemble could well be hailed by the electorate in the next general election, because, of course, they are the party of shining principle, untainted by scandal of any kind - save Bloody Friday, White Cross, Teebane, Warrenpoint, Coleraine, Claudy, Donegall Street, Warrington, Deal and, of course, The Disappeared.