It may be unfair to compare bishops and politicians, writes Garret FitzGerald. But recent events suggest that both vocations have members who are very out of touch with members of their flock/electorate.
There is, however, a difference between bishops and politicians. For I suspect that the former group has at last begun to wake up to how they are seen by their flock. But it is not clear that clientelist politicians have yet understood how the electorate, as distinct from their clients, have come to view them.
Of course, such politicians will answer straightaway that their clients are in fact the electorate: but in making that equivalence, as if the two were identical, they are quite wrong.
First of all, there is a large, and very influential part of the electorate, including a large middle-class floating vote, which is not, and would never be, clients of politicians. And, secondly, even people who do seek help from politicians with personal problems - assistance that in many cases they really do need to overcome problems with bureaucracy - may, in their different role as members of the electorate, be critical of abuses of clientelism.
It should be said that much of the help sought from politicians is genuinely needed. It involves people seeking their rights from an administrative system whose rules are often too complex and rigid to accommodate the hugely differentiated legitimate needs of citizens.
Let me give one simple example from the period in the 1970s when as a TD I held clinics so constituents could meet me and seek my advice. A couple with one child came to see me because the wife could not have any more children and they wanted to adopt a second child. The adoption society could not help them because, due to the housing shortage of that time, they lived in a one-room, privately-rented apartment. Because of that shortage, Dublin Corporation could not provide them with a two-room apartment when they had only one child: families with two or more children had precedence.
Each of these bureaucratic rules was reasonable in itself; together they added up to a piece of inhumanity that could be removed only by an intervention in the system to break the nexus between the two rules - which I eventually succeeded in doing. Apart from the fact that I was able to help a couple in this way, in the process of hearing about and seeking to resolve this and other problems of constituents, I was learning my trade as a legislator.
The system of clinics, at which politicians meet constituents with problems, is thus not merely justifiable: it has a potentially positive role in the process of politicians learning how to do the job for which they are elected - legislation and government administration.
A problem arises where politicians allow this part of their work to take over their lives, to the exclusion of the legislative task for which they are elected. Where a concern to help people and to learn how the administrative system needs to be improved for the benefit of citizens - a concern that initially motivates most entrants to politics - becomes transmuted into little more than a vote-catching clientelist machine.
I recall my astonishment when I became Taoiseach and discovered that the personal secretary who came with me into my Department, and who alone helped me to look after constituents' problems, was about to replace a General Office that was staffed by no less than 16 civil servants, who had been servicing my predecessor's constituency work. Something similar happened after a change of minister in the late 1970s in the Department of Foreign Affairs.
When representations by constituents reach a scale where they cannot be personally processed by a TD - and this often happens when a clientelist TD becomes a minister and has civil servants at his disposal to undertake this task - his or her responsibility to make a decision as to which matters should be pursued, and by what means, may become atrophied.
For, faced with the huge volume of representations that such a minister may generate, he or she may effectively come to abdicate responsibility for the follow-up action to be taken. And in the case of a busy minister who delegates the pursuit of such issues to junior civil servants, it is clearly unreasonable to expect these officials to make fine judgments as to who should be approached, about what course of action, in which particular case.
Was this the trap into which Bobby Molloy fell?
Clearly, once he had developed a system under which, it would appear, all representations regardless of their intrinsic merits were automatically passed on without prior vetting by him, his personal reputation was put at risk - to an extent that his own acknowledged reputation for probity could not protect him from.
Judging by broadcast interviews with him, he seemed to have difficulty in understanding that by operating a system that passed on representations regardless of their intrinsic merit or the propriety of the approach being sought, he was morally engaging his own personal responsibility.
For his part, he saw a huge difference between passing on a query as to the release of a convict awaiting sentence and actually advocating such a course.
But that distinction was lost on his interviewers, and probably on most of those who heard him interviewed - including, I am sure, many past or current clients of politicians.
In his inability to understand how most people would react to his handling of this matter - and I fear his incomprehension may be shared by many of his political colleagues - he sounded to me rather like an unreconstructed bishop.
Something similar applies to ministers who unashamedly transfer parts of their Department to their own constituency, or who divert to it a disproportionate share of grants under their control.
They expect to gain votes locally from such actions, and seem totally unaware of the dreadful impression these near-universal abuses of ministerial power make upon many members of the wider electorate, and of the cynicism about politics that this generates.
Some of those involved have been heard at other times to express concern about the poor reputations of politicians and politics - without seeming to connect that phenomenon with their own actions.
In this they are rather like bishops who have failed children in their diocese in the most shameful way, but seem puzzled that their moral authority on other matters is ignored by their flock.
Can politicians and bishops not see that this kind of blinkered morality of much of both church and state destroys respect for both religious and lay authority?
And as respect for authority of all kinds thus crumbles, society itself is dangerously weakened.