Kids sometimes say the smartest things. In Macbeth, Shakespeare has a nice bit of banter between Lady Macduff and her little son. She tells him that his father is a traitor and he asks what that is, writes Fintan O'Toole.
"Why, one that swears and lies."
"And be all traitors that do so?"
"Everyone that does so is a traitor, and must be hanged."
"Who must hang them?"
"Why, the honest men."
"Then", says the kid, "the liars and swearers are fools: for there are liars and swearers enough to beat the honest men and hang up them."
Not surprisingly, the boy dies a horrible death a few moments later.
This passage came into my head last week as I listened to the reaction to the Supreme Court's confirmation that Beverley Flynn encouraged tax evasion when she was a bank official. Young Master Macduff raises an interesting political question. The whole notion of hanging those who flout the law depends on the assumption that there are fewer of them than there are honest people. The wave of sympathy for Beverley Flynn in Mayo and within Fianna Fáil suggests that this assumption is highly questionable.
Given the number of people who seem to find organised tax evasion at least tolerable, it is a wonder that the dodgy folk don't beat the honest men and hang them up.
Moral repugnance only really operates when it's based on a broad social consensus. And the reality is that there is plainly no social consensus in Ireland that corruption or unethical behaviour in public life is unacceptable. Even the ultimate crime of getting caught doesn't seem to bother many of us.
Last week's Supreme Court judgment told us nothing we didn't know about Beverley Flynn. Even if she had won her appeal on a legal technicality, it wouldn't have altered the fact that a jury of her peers - a jury she chose to go before - found that she did encourage her clients to unlawfully deprive the State of revenue to pay for public services.
Her constituents knew that when they re-elected her last time out, just as Michael Lowry's constituents knew him to be a large-scale tax evader when they re-elected him.
A significant section of the Irish electorate still adores a defiant rogue. Even in the case of Charles Haughey, I've always thought that what lost him the idolatry of his fans was not his roguery but his lack of defiance. If, instead of his bumbling, pathetic attempts at denial in the face of the overwhelming evidence of corruption accumulated by McCracken, he had simply come out and said: "Yes, I took the money. Because I'm worth it" they'd have loved him all the more.
The other requirement for public honesty is a sense of shame on the part of those who do get caught. And we don't have that either. Beverley Flynn is completely honest in one respect - her utter conviction that she did nothing wrong and has nothing to be ashamed of. (She might, however, have thought up a more original excuse than "I was only following orders." )
Noel Dempsey is genuinely puzzled at the notion that there's something unethical about taking public money (in the form of civil service time and facilities) and giving it to his own political party. And this absence of shame is a function of Irish society too: why feel ashamed when so many of the people around you can't see the problem?
This isn't the result of some kind of peculiar pathological condition that's carried in the Irish air. It arises from a fundamental disconnection in people's heads between the moral standards of public life and the quality of public services. Think, for a moment, about the nice people in Castlebar who've been rallying around Beverley and who will re-elect her anytime she wants. Their position is essentially made up of two parts: (a) the Flynns are good local politicians who will use their skills to funnel public money to the town; and (b) involvement in tax dodging is irrelevant to this basic task.
A moment's thought would convince anyone on the outside that these two propositions are incompatible. Public money comes from taxes and institutionalised tax evasion means there's less of it. The people who are clapping Beverley on the back and telling her not to mind those Dublin creeps are the same who will be out marching when the local hospital is a shambles and their kids are in rat-infested schools.
It's probably true that a majority of Irish people do find this kind of thing repugnant, at least in the abstract. But the dodgy dealers and their hangers-on still form a formidable democratic constituency. If she finds herself without a party, Beverley Flynn could profitably consider forming one with Michael Lowry and a few others under the slogan: "Say it once, say it loud/ I'm dodgy and I'm proud."
They could express, quite openly and without circumlocution, the needs and desires of a significant section of the population that genuinely doesn't believe that ethics matter. Frankly, for the rest of us, it would be a relief to be done with the hypocrisy.