WHEN the Democratic Left TD Mr Erie Byrne said on last week's News at One that he believed the Minister for Justice, Mrs Nora Owen, should continue in office unless any of the prisoners implicated in the current controversy walked free, he appeared to be saying that accountability is related to consequences rather than actions, and that the Government should only impose sanctions commensurate with the consequences.
This is not, of course, the way things work in the real world. For example, if I were to get drunk and drive my car on to a public road, knock somebody down and leave him or her lingering on a life support machine, it is unlikely that a court of law, in adjudicating upon the seriousness of my offence, would take into account the fact that my victim had not yet died.
The penalty would be in accordance with an ethical view of my actions rather than of their consequences. This would be appropriate, given that the initial act of driving while drunk was something for which I would have responsibility, while the question of whether my victim lived would be outside my control.
Are we to conclude, then, that a different set of ethics applies in the political arena? The right answer is: not always. For example, during the 1994 crisis which culminated in the downfall of the Fianna Fail/Labour coalition, I do not recall any weight being placed on the fact that, notwithstanding the mistakes which led to the controversy, the priest Brendan Smyth was not at liberty to go out and abuse other children. Had the logic of Eric Byrne's position been applied on that occasion, Albert Reynolds might still be Taoiseach.
One way of summarising things would be to say that the Labour Party in 1994 permitted itself to apply the moral logic of the real world, and in 1996 adopted the real politik option.
I feel it important to stress that I am not being judgmental about this, but simply attempting to describe the forces which I perceive in these two crises. (As it happens, I do not believe Mrs Owen should resign, regardless of whether any or all of the prisoners walk free from court. But then again, neither do I believe that the 1994 crisis should have resulted in the collapse of the government.) My point is that, in order to explain the different attitudes taken by the Labour Party to two ostensibly similar situations, we need to look beyond the realm of ethics and morality.
A CYNIC or a Fianna Failer (and is there a difference, ha, ha, ha?) might observe that one difference about this time is that the Lab our Party does not have any options for negotiating itself into any other form of government without an election. It will be recalled that when the previous crisis occurred, the Dail arithmetic had altered so as to provide such an option.
It would, of course, be extremely foolish of the Labour Party to go to the country now on this issue. And this is not just because of the lack of further parliamentary permutations or because the popularity of the party is at such a low ebb. It is also because the public does not perceive this issue to be of sufficient importance to merit the downfall of another government, at least for as long as the consequences of the errors remain under control. And here, I believe, we are close to the kernel of the logic articulated by Eric Byrne.
For, by this logic, what is at issue is not so much consequences as perceived consequences. It is the landscape of public perception rather than of ethics or responsibility that is being studied and addressed.
The tent pole of this culture is the abuse of language. A comparison of the journalistic language used to describe the 1994 crisis with that of the recent one would make a fascinating subject for an academic thesis. For example, while the 1994 editorials yielded epithets like "unpardonable", "shabbiness", "deceit", "sleaze", "cowardly", "noxious" and "demeaning", the 1996 model rose only to the modest levels of "debacle", "fiasco", "embarrassment" and "obfuscation". In this linguistic climate, it is not surprising that the Judge Lynch crisis never built up the kind of steam needed to result in resignations or dismissals. The term "Lynchgate" was not used.
The baleful influence of this thesaurus morality goes back to the 1980s and the National Handlers, the elite group of Fine Gael advisers who implanted in the public mind the notion that Irish politics was defined by, on the one hand, Garret the Good, and on the other, Charles Haughey, whom his friend John Healy described ironically in this context as "The Great National Bastard".
By appropriating words like "integrity", "transparency" and "accountability", the Handlers succeeded in imposing a moral handicap on Fianna Fail which made it impossible for other parties to be judged by the same yardstick. Using this self contained language, they created and fed a set of perceptions which can still be called up from the collective memory at a moment's notice.
Where Fianna Fail is concerned it requires only a very small degree of suggestion to be added to the existing public perception in order to create a public appetite for sanctions. Other parties are innocent until something extreme and unprecedented occurs, such as the putative wholesale release of prisoners mooted by Eric Byrne.
In keeping with the spirit of the times, let us leave aside the question of whether this is right or wrong, and pause to wonder at the imperviousness of the process to either criticism or exposition. For no matter how often Fianna Filers draw attention to the inequity of their treatment, their protests will have no effect.
EVEN if Fianna Fail could produce empirical proof of different standards being applied to it, it would not matter, because the culture is constructed in such a way that the "other side" doubles as referee. The process is implicit rather than explicit, which is to say that, although everyone - politicians, media and public - is aware of, and co operates with, its unspoken tenets, it remains deniable. While not exactly invisible, it is largely impervious to objective scrutiny.
The syndrome was neatly captured by Sean O'Rourke on last Tuesday's News at One when he asked Labour's Jim Kemmy if it was the case that errors involving Fianna Fail should always involve serious sanctions, but errors implicating Fine Gael required only "the raising of an eyebrow". But since the culture has an inbuilt device for dealing with such inquiries, these are of limited benefit in highlighting its inconsistencies.
On being presented with such logic, opinion formers and the like will simply rummage deep in their memories to try to recall some detail about the interrogator which might suggest why he or she is posing such questions. In my own case, for example, it is sufficient to recall that I "wrote that book about Sean Doherty".
In short, there is no protecting Fianna Fail from anything the political culture throws at it, and no indicting any other party for actions or inactions whose consequences fall short of rocking the State to its foundations.