A long time ago, when I was a philosophy student at UCD, a great deal of time was spent on the question of knowledge. How do we know things, and how do we know that we know them? - that sort of thing. Back then, I was rather impatient with all of this stuff, which seemed like a rather tedious and pointless game. Now, though, I'm not so sure. For as soon as you start to think about the nature of corruption in Irish public life, you discover that knowledge is a much less simple concept than we tend to assume. If you look at Irish politics over the last 25 years, you find it is possible both to know and not to know certain things at any given time.
As the Flood and Moriarty tribunals have been painstakingly filling in the ugly picture of public life in the Haughey era, a standard line has emerged from those who still have a stake in the increasingly discredited system. It goes as follows: We are all shocked and stunned by what is coming out. If we knew then what we know now, we would have acted very differently. But hindsight is 20/20 vision, and our actions must be judged by our knowledge at the time.
It is true, of course, that the precise details now being supplied by the tribunals were not available in the past. But it's simply not true that the nature of people like Charles Haughey and Ray Burke, and of the system which they operated, was in any way obscure. There was much more than vague rumours of scandal.
AS EARLY as 1974 the investigative reporter Joe McAnthony wrote an extensive front-page story for the Sunday Independent on Ray Burke, the recently elected Fianna Fail TD for North Dublin. McAnthony revealed that Burke had received £15,000 - then a massive sum - from the house-builders Brennan and McGowan. The report was based on the most impeccable of sources: Brennan and McGowan's accounts, in which the payment was listed under the heading "Planning". At the time, Ray Burke was a county councillor who often sponsored motions to rezone land owned by Brennan and McGowan. He was also an auctioneer who sold the houses the company built on this land. McAnthony's story, backed up by documentary proof, made it absolutely clear that Burke was in the pay of the developers.
For over a quarter of a century, in other words, we have known what is supposedly being "revealed" by the Flood tribunal. This is not to say that the tribunal is unimportant or that it is not also giving us a great deal of new information. But the basic question of whether Ray Burke was in the pay of developers was, in principle, answered right at the start of Burke's career in national politics. Except that in some weird way we didn't "know" these facts at all.
There was a Garda investigation into McAnthony's revelations and a file was sent to the DPP, but nothing happened. Ray Burke's political career blossomed exactly as if McAnthony's story had never been written. Within three years of the Sunday Independent story he was a Minister of State and within another three years he was a Minister. While Joe McAnthony found himself so much of an outsider that he had to emigrate to Canada, Ray Burke became one of the ultimate insiders.
Nor did we "know" what the Flood tribunal has also revealed, that systematic corruption on Dublin County Council was allowing a small group of developers effectively to buy the development of the capital city for over a decade. Yet, over seven years ago, Mark Brennock and Frank McDonald wrote a front-page story for this newspaper headed "Cash in brown paper bags for councillors", and went on to write a series of articles exposing the system that was then in force. Around the same time, one former councillor, Labour's Joan Burton, then a Minister of State, gave a detailed public description of the way the council conducted its business. Somehow, this knowledge, too, remained unknown.
THE EASY way to explain all this is to blame the public. Since ordinary citizens remained hopelessly naive about all of this, the political system could afford to ignore it. Another standard line these days, in fact, is that public confidence in the system has been shattered by recent revelations, implying, of course, that until recently the public implicitly trusted their political leaders.
This, too, is patently untrue. It's worth looking back on an MRBI poll conducted for an RTE Today Tonight programme produced by Mary Raftery in November 1991, long before the current tribunals were envisaged. At the time, the Greencore, Telecom, Carysfort and Goodman scandals had been unfolding. In this context, the answers given to some basic questions show that, in all the essentials, the public knew in 1991 precisely what it knows now.
To the proposition that "there is a Golden Circle of people in Ireland who are using power to make money for themselves", a massive 89 per cent agreed. Eighty-one per cent agreed that the people in this Golden Circle were made up in equal measure of business people and politicians. Seventy-six per cent thought the scandals were "part and parcel" of the Irish economic system rather than one-off events. Eighty-three per cent thought that the then current scandals were merely "the tip of the iceberg", while 84 per cent said business people involved in corrupt dealings and fraud get off more lightly than other criminals. Significantly, the figures for Fianna Fail voters were, in general, only slightly lower than those for supporters of other parties.
Somehow, though, all of this knowledge remained inert and ineffective. It was so well known that it came to be factored in to the prevailing view of the public world, becoming an established fact, like the weather or the lie of the land. Since nothing came of it - no resignations, no prosecutions, no political upheavals - it just lay there in some abstract limbo between reality and fiction. And if nothing comes of the current tribunals, the knowledge we are gaining from them will become, in just the same way, unknown.
fotoole@irish-times.ie