If Liam Lawlor finds himself in jail in the next few weeks for being less than frank with the Flood tribunal, he might be prompted to write a prison notebook. This might detail not just the indignities of prison life suffered by himself and his fellow prisoners but also, perhaps, some personal reflections on the arbitrariness of his punishment.
He might, for instance, wonder what is so bad about land developers, accountants, bankers, public relations consultants and chancers giving large amounts of money to politicians when, apparently, it is fine for the same assortment to give money to political parties? Why is it OK to buy a job-lot of politicians and so wrong to give money to a single politician?
He might also ruminate about the tribunals. What is the point of this investigative frenzy if the political establishment is united to a man (the women don't matter) in agreeing not to draw the obvious conclusion from the revelations of all the skulduggery: the banning of all private finance from the political arena?
If it is wrong for an individual to buy political favour by giving large amounts of money to a politician why is it not wrong for a wealthy group to buy political favour by giving large amounts of money to a political party?
Why is it not wrong for a political party that favours the interests of a rich group in society to have an advantage over a political party that favours a poor group?
Liam Lawlor's ruminations might extend a little further. How is it that the interests of such many groups in society - who together constitute a clear majority - are subordinated to the interests of a small group in society? Take, for instance, women. Why do women put up with a position of subordination?
How is it that there are vastly more women in poverty than men, that there are vastly fewer women in positions of power than men (the courts, the banks, the professions, the State, the board rooms, the trade unions, even gynaecologists are nearly all men).
How is it that power, influence, money, the media are concentrated in such few hands generally? How could this be in a society that is supposed to be democratic, where the majority, if they wanted to, could decide simply that there has to be a radically fairer distribution of power and influence and money and status than there is?
Liam might also have time to wonder why it is that his fellow prisoners - apart from himself - are nearly all from the poorer social groups in society, that the majority are in jail for relatively trivial harms. Liam may be in a position to know of scoundrels who have done harm in terms of thievery on a massive scale through inside trading on shares and gross tax fraud and lots of other frauds. Not one of them in jail. How could this be?
Liam may come across a few people who have been targeted by the Criminal Assets Bureau. He may be given to wonder why it is that the CAB seems not a tiny bit interested in the proceeds of the wide-scale crime that has been uncovered by various inquiries recently.
Would it ever cross the corporate mind of the CAB to target the banks that were massively the beneficiaries of the crimes committed on the DIRT tax? Would it cross its corporate mind to target the proceeds of the crimes that accountants and lawyers covered up and that we now know about?
Liam might find the ruminations of another jailbird helpful in the disentangling of these conundrums. This is someone else who wrote a prison notebook and became quite famous afterwards, although his fame is among a crowd that Liam might find uncongenial.
This is Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist who was imprisoned in 1928 and died in prison in 1937. His fame among a sect of Marxists derives from his Quaderni del Carcere (Prison Notebooks), which were published more than a decade after he died.
Gramsci was intrigued by the "spontaneous consent" of the masses to a social system that, manifestly, was opposed to their interests. He saw this as arising not from crude economic domination as other Marxists insisted, but from a cultural domination, a cultural hegemony.
This hegemony involves domination through everyday routine structures and "commonsense" values. In this mix come the churches, the media and the educational system as well as politics and economics, all engendering a "commonsense" ideology, which masks the domination of the masses by the few.
It is this hegemony that prompts us to think of crime in terms of the harms of the poor, as against the harms of the rich (petty theft and huge tax fraud), that conceptualises women in domestic roles and men in roles of influence and power (who thinks of a surgeon as a woman?), that conceives of "balance" between the competing demands of the underprivileged and privileged.
Fairness in politics is not enough of a corrective for there are biases in education, in the churches, in the law, in the media, especially the media that fix the cultural hegemony. The media now controlled by a few individuals reflect the values and morals of those individuals, as mediated by compliant editors. The public service broadcaster, RTE, is as helpless a victim of cultural hegemony: how else can the Crimeline programme, sponsored by Hibernia Insurance, which focuses almost exclusively on the crimes of the poor be explained?