Corruption has helped shape boom economy of the 1990s

Watching Irish politics over the last 15 years has been like practising deep space astronomy. It used to be that astronomers watched the skies and noted what they could see. Now, trying to figure out what is going on in the wider universe, they pay as much attention to what they cannot see.

By observing the motions of heavenly bodies they guess at the forces that must be operating on them: the gravity that makes light bend, the attraction or repulsion that alters a planet's orbit, the push and pull that makes things move. From the way known objects behave, they can be pretty sure that bodies they cannot yet see are affecting them. Eventually, as they look harder, they get clear images of where those bodies are buried.

So it has been with Irish political life. It's been obvious to anybody looking at it with half an eye that invisible forces have influenced its movements. Decisions have been made, actions taken, that are simply inexplicable unless we assume the presence of some unseen force, some hidden pull. We have to conjecture that this force is corruption. But until the McCracken tribunal report, we couldn't see it with the naked eye, name or place it. Even now, we don't have the clear, sharp images of our political universe that would allow us to understand exactly how it has worked. We have seen one exploding supernova, Charles Haughey, and we've been able to track the eccentric orbit of a minor satellite, Michael Lowry.

We have witnessed some fascinating cosmological phenomena: the Telecom affair, the Greencore scandal, the beef scandal, the sale of Carysfort and so on, which have yet to be fully explained. But mostly, we still have to work on the assumption that there are many black holes out there, uncharted but discernible by their effects.

The Flood and Moriarty tribunals may or may not fill in some of those black holes. The question, though, is whether all of this is worth the effort, whether it really makes sense for a society to go in a week from the epic grandeur of the May 22nd referendums to the shambolic embarrassment of Bertie Ahern's attempts to deal with the revelations about Ray Burke and Fitzwilton. Do we have to put ourselves through this? Surely, if a line can be drawn under the past in Northern Ireland, and people like Gerry Adams and David Ervine can become respectable democrats, then the same can be done for the relatively minor matter of political graft. Surely, now that the banana republic has become the apple of Europe's eye, we shouldn't be tarnishing our bright new image with the grubby details of another era.

Well, in both cases, surely not. The absolute condition for supporters of violence to become democrats is that they undertake never to do it again. And the one thing we know about corruption is that the only way to stop it happening again and again is to make certain that, however long it takes, those who engage in it will be caught and punished. Corruption comes from arrogance and arrogance springs from a sense of impunity. As of now, for the powerful, impunity is still a safe assumption.

And corruption is not incidental to the creation of our boom economy. It's not an unfortunate past which we have left behind. On the contrary, it is one of the things that shaped the way we are now. In two important ways, it helped to determine the kind of boom society we would have.

Firstly, it is generally agreed that the stringent fiscal policies of Charles Haughey's governments after 1987, the control of the current budget deficit and the slowing of the growth in the national debt contributed significantly to the emergence of the economic boom later on. The era when Charles Haughey's cronies were doing the rounds of the rich businessmen was also the time when the Republic was undergoing a traumatic adjustment to the hard realities of the global economy.

The question we have to ask is: was it entirely coincidental that the pain of that adjustment was visited disproportionately on the weak and the poor? Was it chance that while old people were lying for days on hospital trolleys because wards had been closed, some businessmen were receiving extraordinary largesse from the State? That while primary schools were falling apart, no serious effort to correct public finances by actually collecting taxes from the very rich was ever made? That even when a major Irish company like Goodman International was caught evading its tax responsibilities, which it actually admitted, no one was brought to book?

Those questions are not academic inquiries about the past. They relate directly to one of the most pertinent facts of Irish life in 1998, that the gains are not being shared by those who took, and continue to take, the pain.

Until we understand the choices made in the course of Ireland's entry into the global economy, we will not be able to see what choices we still have to make. Until we know why some were given a leg up into the roaring 1990s while others were kicked in the face, we won't be able to come to terms with the coexistence of manic affluence and mean despair in 1990s Ireland.

The second present-day consequence of corruption is precisely the nature of that economy itself. One of its outstanding features, and one of the main causes for anxiety about its future, is the extraordinary degree to which it depends on external investment. Or, to put it another way, the extraordinary degree to which it has not been driven by Irish entrepreneurs.

There are many reasons for that failure, but the cosy relationship between a small golden circle of native business people and some key members of the political elite is certainly one of them.

Nothing discourages enterprise more than the belief that the system is crooked and that rivals with an "in" already have it sewn up. Nothing stifles innovation more effectively than the easy availability of nice little earners, accessible through the simple application of monetary grease to the wheels of the political gravy train. And who would want to risk money in the messy business of creating products and jobs when it could be snuggled up safely on the Cayman Islands in the very best of political company?

Corruption helped to make us what we are. Only by seeing it clearly can we see what that is, and what, with better politics, we might become.

Fintan O'Toole is temporarily based in New York