On the morning after Bertie Ahern's crypto-apology to the Irish people, the newspapers carried updates on three sets of legal proceedings currently before the courts, writes John Waters.
One told of the application of two lesbians seeking recognition for a "marriage" they claim to have undergone in Canada. Another brought news that hearings are concluding in a case in which a woman seeks to avail of the right-to-life amendment to the Constitution to vindicate what she claims is her right to give birth to a child or children from the frozen embryos created with her now estranged husband. A third report concerned an appeal to the Supreme Court by a young married couple who recently failed in a High Court action to recover from the adoptive parents the baby girl they gave up for adoption two years ago while unmarried.
The three cases are different but have many characteristics in common. All involve interpretations of aspects of the Constitution, and in that sense might suggest themselves for filing under "complex legal issues".
But you might also define all three as examples of issues where politics has abrogated its responsibility. Although the three cases involve intricate legal issues, none of them reflects a particular unique or even inordinately unusual situation for citizens of modern Ireland to find themselves in. All three could long since have been legislated for.
The question of same-sex marriages has been around for yonks, but most politicians are reluctant to become embroiled in the attendant controversy. The issue of in vitro fertilisation is one of a range of complex bioethical conundrums which have been staring our societies in the face for some years, but which politicians prefer to leave to the scientists and the priests. And, of course, as I've been saying for a decade, the Irish Constitution is now several decades behind the reality of family life as lived by vast numbers of Irish people.
Here, as with any issue where easy answers are unavailable, interventions by politicians have been confined to occasional all-party committees which deliberate and report at length only to have their conclusions banished to the limbo that awaits any thoughts of politicians on anything that, by virtue of being remotely relevant to the lives of real people, results in differences of opinion.
And as real life makes it own way and the citizenry looks to the courts to sort out its authentic ethical dilemmas, the national parliament day and night plays Political Probity, the stuck-record of Irish political and media culture for the past three decades.
There is no chancer of a journalist, Opposition spokesperson or social commentator who could not get a round of applause on Questions and Answers by saying something sombre about the need to make politicians accountable to ethical standards. The problem is not with this concept per se, but with the idea that the entirety of the public requirement from politicians comprises the necessity that they be honest and transparent and observant of a multiplicity of ethical codes. This utterly banal idea has come to dominate Irish politics in a way that is not merely monotonous and boring, but pushes all other considerations to one side. It seems not to matter how stupid, pompous or useless a politician is so long as he or she has never accepted a gift from a businessman.
It seems not to matter how vacuous the content of a party's manifesto so long as that party is intolerant of unethical behaviour. It is as though the obsession with sexual asceticism that long infected Irish Catholicism has undergone a metamorphosis and attached itself to the political culture. This fetish for ethics has become so ubiquitous that it is now virtually impossible to argue that, while probity has its place, the sole purpose of politics is not the enforcement of probity on politicians.
At first glance you might find it odd that such important and complex matters as, for example, family rights or bioethical developments can continue to be ignored by politicians, and therefore come to be legislated for by members of the judiciary, without this attracting unfavourable commentary in the media.
It is obvious this situation suits most media operatives, who are generally "liberal" and are happy that they now seem to share this liberalism with a growing number of the judiciary. Since most of the "conservative" figures who once dominated the upper benches have passed on or retired, media people generally tend to hold that complex matters of a socio-ethical character are best left to judges, who are more likely than politicians to come up with the "right" answers. The public, after all, remains implacably sceptical about "progressive" changes and its wishes are therefore best circumvented if possible. To the extent that the cowardice of politicians is an inadequate guarantor that politics will continue to avoid the most pressing issues of our time, it has been necessary to maintain a diversion that forces parliamentary politics to spend most of its time arguing about a narrower and ultimately inconsequential notion of ethics. This diversion is headed: "Probity in Public Life".