There is a theme running through public debate at the moment, the theme of guilt and punishment. One of its easier manifestations is the question: "Should Dr Casey be allowed come home?" I certainly think
Exile is a dreadful sanction, not that the Ireland I grew up in, heavily influenced by Dr Casey's church's teaching on contraception, thought twice about that when it insisted that Irish mothers bear the many thousands of Irish children who were surplus to Ireland's requirements and destined for lifelong exile.
But let that pass. There's a limit to how much you can blame any one individual for anything. Take Mr Haughey. I happen to know that a woman went up to him at President McAleese's inauguration and tapped him on the shoulder. He turned around, beginning to smile. "You have some nerve showing your face in here," she said. "You should be ashamed to go out!"
Some people would cheer her on. But the very thought of this little episode makes me cringe. This is not, surely, how to do things. Surely the visible, public, humiliation of another person is not the way towards a better society. The harm Mr Haughey did most of us was impersonal. What's more, he didn't do us only harm. Also, he is not beyond the law. He is not a Mobutu, who sat on his billions in Switzerland out of reach of any sanctions, while his looted country reeled.
There are those who would love to see Mr Haughey and Dr Casey stripped of everything. But I think human vengefulness is less appropriate the closer it comes to the ultimate reckonings, which are beyond all of us. Death closes some accounts, at least. Dr Casey is 70. Mr Haughey is 72.
Surely there's a difference between punishing the vigorous to deter them, and punishing the elderly, mainly to relieve the angers of the aggrieved? I'm talking about home-made punishments, which the aggrieved themselves decide on. Punishments like spitting on miscreants at railway junctions, or taking honorary titles back, or drumming them out of clubs.
The invocation of the law is a quite different matter. I don't believe myself that the age of the defendant should be any bar to court proceedings. The law is in a real way about principle, not persons. Fundamental human values are restated through the prosecution of cases against Nazi warcriminals, say, or domestic criminals like the abusing father in Sligo, the sufferings of whose children we are at last sharing through his daughter's courage in going to court.
The selves of these defendants are not the point: the actions their selves performed are. But where for one reason or another the distanced and abstract punitive function of the law cannot be invoked, I think punishment is very difficult to administer. And guilt is hard to define.
It amazes me, therefore, that so many people are so comfortable with their own righteousness. Take the people righteous on the subject of Francis Stuart. How can they know that they would not have made broadcasts in Berlin during the war, in the circumstances described in Black List, Section H?
I don't know what I would have done. I don't know what I would have done if the police had come to my village and taken away the Jews. Nothing, probably. This century has tested the moral quality of people entirely unready for the test. The founders of this State, for instance, had to face the extremely difficult question of how far it was morally right to go in pursuit of national self-determination. Maire Mac an tSaoi was Francis Stuart's chief accuser at an Aosdana meeting recently. She is a wonderful woman, in my opinion, and a poet and woman of letters of great value, and a heroine to lovers of Irish for what she brought to the language and created of it.
Her father, Sean MacEntee, also served Ireland, as a revolutionary and a devoted colleague of men believed in their time by sincere people to be terrorists, torturers and cold-blooded killers. Her husband was a devoted servant of the late Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, who many sincere people would characterise as a despot.
This doesn't in the slightest affect her right to arraign Francis Stuart as the anti-Semite she has been led to believe him to be. But it shows the difficulty of categorising human beings, and the care we need to take before consigning one to outer darkness.
This is not a plea for relativism. We have to keep a sense of fundamental moral outrage alive. Take the Sligo father who tortured and degraded his helpless family. He, you may think, was outside morality; a monster. But what about some of the people around him?
I know a journalist who was sent to that area when the man was convicted to get local reaction. One reaction was: "Those kids are only in it for the money. There was nothing done to them at all. They're only looking for compensation." Another was: "There wasn't a thing wrong with those children. They were as well fed as any child around here."
Someone has to be brave enough to stand up in a community and say: "Something wrong is going on." But how do you keep moral outrage alive without letting moral vigilantism loose? It is easy to be righteous about situations you were never part of. It is easier to be eloquent about the Holocaust than to take your courage in your hands and knock on a neighbour's door and say: "Did I hear screaming?" It is easier to stand up at Aosdana and explain how moved you are by the tragedy of European Jewry than to walk away from a woman you think is gorgeous because you have a wife to whom you have made vows.
I don't regret at all the present furores about Francis Stuart and Charles Haughey and Eamonn Casey. At least they make all of us think about personal moral responsibility. But I wish we earned our moral spurs with a bit more effort than just by looking down on others.
It is no light thing to publicly condemn another person. I take it that the people who are condemning Francis Stuart are not doing it on the basis of seeming remarks in a polemical film where the editing was in someone else's hands. That would be madness. I take it that they're doing it on the basis of all the writing, autobiographical and other, which he has offered for the consideration of the world. If someone finds an anti-Semitic tendency in this work, then so be it. I don't. In fact, I remember the spiritual excitement of reading Redemption and, later, Black List, Section H.
It is in gratitude for this, as well as a certain awe in the presence of all the history he has been part of (which I also feel in the company of Conor Cruise O'Brien and Maire Mac an tSaoi) and because he seems to welcome me, that I go out to Francis Stuart in the retirement home he's staying in now. He talks about the cosmos, and the cat sits on his lap and watches him. If this image drives the righteous crazy, it can't be helped. Life refuses, in this instance as in most others, to answer to our desire for things to be either black or white.