OPINION/John Waters: Imagining we had sufficient cause for worry about the drift of affairs in our police force, we received news last week that gardaí who launched an unprovoked attack on protesters at last summer's Reclaim the Streets demonstration in Dublin are unlikely to face charges because none of their colleagues is prepared to identify them.
All 150 officers who policed the parade have been contacted by the Garda Complaints Board, which is investigating the episode, but none is prepared to identify a colleague from video footage of gardaí laying into protesters. This confirms something which has been obvious for some time: many gardaí, perhaps now the majority of the force, believe themselves to be immune from the laws they are paid to enforce.
Even slightly more disturbing was the response of the chairman of the Garda Complaints Board, Mr Gordon Holmes. In bemoaning what he termed "the general lack of co-operation", Mr Holmes was reported as saying that he "couldn't help thinking" that many gardaí were putting loyalty to their colleagues ahead of that to the force.
But the issue at stake here is no more loyalty to the Garda Síochána than it is loyalty of one garda to another. I cannot help thinking that the issue is loyalty to the State and obedience to the laws and principles which underpin the rights of citizens as set forth in the Constitution. Mr Holmes's Freudian slip confirms something we should have suspected: that there exists at the heart of our apparatus of law enforcement a kind of "appalling vista" belief system which holds that the institutions of State are coterminous with or more important than the principles which underpin them. And that, when hardy comes to hardy, the protection of these institutions is more important than the protection of the State or its citizens.
This belief is so pervasive in our society that nobody passed the slightest remark concerning Mr Holmes's odd depiction of the difficulty. Unsurprisingly, this too is the issue at the heart of the disagreement between the McBeartys and the Government/Morris tribunal. The McBeartys want the terms of reference extended to examine the role of the authorities in dealing with their allegations of Garda corruption. The authorities appear to want the tribunal to yield yet another controlled explosion of the truth.
For all the talk of recent years about letting in the light on the dark corners of Irish society, the growing evidence - as demonstrated in the various tribunals, and the media coverage of them - is that the objectives of many of those driving the process are not sufficiently absolute to result in anything but evasion. After a decade of tribunals, our so-called root-and-branch inquiries have resulted in the snapping off of a fistful of desiccated twigs.
The syndrome which infects the Garda Síochána is identifiable also in those other bodies and interests which have been appointed, or which have elected themselves, to prosecute what they term the public interest in these matters.
By interests I mean, in the main, the media and the legal professions, both of which presuppose their own motives and actions to be beyond suspicion, that the objectives they set forth are coterminous with the interests of society, and that the principles they police with regard to corruption, abuses of power and other malfunctions are no more than rough guides which should not be taken too literally in relation to themselves.
Their endeavours often seem to have slipped adrift of an ethical anchorage, being increasingly geared to the transformation of society to their own liking. Lawyers don't appear to have any sense of irony about the fact that they receive six- or seven-figure sums for exposing people who took bungs of four- or five-figure sums. Journalists appear to believe the process to be about expunging their ideological opponents and replacing them with friends and allies. Underneath, the corruption just changes form.
There exists a somewhat persuasive psychodynamic explanation: that Irish institutions remained so long out of native control that we have failed to manage the transition to running them in a principled manner on our own behalf. Because the Irish personality was formed in a state of enslavement, our essential guiding ideas of authority became mixed up with those of subversion. Freed, we fundamentally failed to comprehend that the principles underlying our institutions were more vital than the institutions. Such principles, when they were identified at all, were spelt out with either moralistic fervour - which we do not trust - or a knowing irony, which we comprehend beyond words, and which now dominates our civic culture.
The idea that tribunals have improved our civic culture would be laughable were it not so tragic. There is little sense from the operation or reporting of these tribunals of the principles of an ethical society being rehabilitated, or what this might mean. Being driven mainly by political vendettas, greed, neurosis and a mutated form of religious piety, this process is not reliable, being itself no more rooted in principle than the activities of the wrong-doers being exposed. In 30 years we may have to establish a tribunal to examine this, the Age of Tribunals.