Perhaps the most surprising phenomenon of modern, cash-rich Ireland is its tendency to engage in regular public bouts of hysterics on usually unexpected issues.
Consider Irish Ferries, where most of the workforce want to accept the redundancy package being offered by the company. Despite what one letter-writer to this newspaper declared last week, no-one has been "cruelly sacked"; yet many if not most of the 100,000 marchers in Dublin last week would probably have uttered some similarly inaccurate and antediluvian mumbo-jumbo about tyrannical bosses and oppressed workers, before returning to their workplaces and to nearly the highest standard of living in the world.
The Irish Ferries frenzy was followed by the Ivor Callely uproar. Suddenly he became the worst man in the history of Irish democracy; and tomorrow, what? Who can say? But one thing is for sure: the subject will be the focus for a week-long festival of unreason and moral grandstanding. It is as if we have had a lobotomy of that part of our brain which governs rational debate, and instead of calm ratiocination, we opt for fevered emotional outpourings on whatever issue is chosen next by the high kings in the broadcast media.
This is very strange, for Irish society was until recently characterised by a certain patient stoicism, a philosophic acceptance that the world was not always a good place, and there was not always a lot that could be done about it. It cannot be said that this emotional restraint was necessarily a good thing: under the veil of that moral reticence, great evils were done, in the certain knowledge that no discovery was possible.
But it is not in praise of such a society to point out that it existed, and it is now as extinct as the civilisation of the Incas. In its place, we have a new social culture governed by a priestly hierarchy whose croziers are wielded in the broadcast and tabloid media; and they set the agenda on almost every topic.
Disinterested interest, objective analysis, measured assessments, careful dissection: these have become almost obsolete terms as we become a crude and merciless Orwellian society with our weekly hatreds, in which there is almost a sense of failure if someone's life or reputation has not been destroyed by the mob. Irish political culture is now defined by its regular moral flash-floods.
This taste for hysteria is not confined to the media; it has even permeated the conduct of the law. Poor Nora Wall and Pablo McCabe could only have been prosecuted for rape on the pathetic and contemptible body of evidence against them in a society which had become empirically dysfunctional, and which simply could not tell the utterly preposterous from the clinically ascertainable. As shocking as the wicked injustice done to Nora and Pablo has been the subsequent public lack of shame and recrimination after the injustice done to them was uncovered: no pause for reflection, no questions about how we conduct debate in Ireland, no concern about whether the catastrophe that engulfed their lives might give us lessons for the future.
For we have created a world in which folklore, urban myth, forensic science and the rule of law have all become indistinguishable, their terms interchangeable. The language of the laboratory is confounded with the jibberings of the rumour factory; the outcome is to be decided upon by the mob and its leaders in Montrose and the Oireachtas. And since mobs do not know contrition, they do not in repentance revisit the corpses of their victims: in Nora's case, metaphorical, in Pablo's quite literal, for he died in disgrace. Where the uproar over that?
Where the outcry? It is as if the death of the moral authority of the Catholic Church has deprived us of a moral compass, though we still yearn for a moral order, with a clear sense of right and wrong. So, to satisfy that appetite for certainty, morality is now personalised in the week's hate figure. And since the new priesthood measures its congregations in listenership ratings, advertising returns and column inches of reportage in newspapers, it sees no advantage in being careful or responsible and measured.
So all sermons of this priesthood are brimstone, all the addresses are fire: these are our new Redemptorists, endlessly searching for a new topic to wax wrathful about. Their success is not measured by the illumination they achieve with their words, but by the frenzy to which they have stirred their followers.
And though in one sense the regular hysteria sweeping through Irish life is a new phenomenon of the past decade or so, in another it is not: we can see its tiny seeds in Irish history - in the boycott of the Protestants in Fethard, or of the Jews in Limerick, in the Abbey riots, in the vile divorce and abortion referendum campaigns of the 1980s. The mob was always there, but was usually asleep, and the Catholic Church did not lightly - and very seldom deliberately - rouse it from its slumbers.
But in secular, post-Catholic, peace process Ireland, those seeds have grown into a diseased and poisonous forest, in which the mob stands perpetually poised, waiting for the next call emanating from the airwaves, and often enough to a Shinner agenda. We have our Abbey riots and our Limerick boycott almost weekly now; and in this utterly depraved moral order, an unpaid painters' bill is, in terms of political consequence, an infinitely greater crime than the abduction, murder and secret burial of Jean McConville.