I heard an eminent journalist on radio last week state that the jailing of Liam Lawlor represented, at last, a response from the judiciary to public demands that something be done about political corruption. That would mean that Mr Justice Smyth had acted out of a desire to mollify public opinion rather than to uphold the law of the land. I feel sure there is no question of this.
As one who predicted nobody would spend a night in jail as a result of the work of the tribunals, I suppose I am expected to be comforted by Mr Lawlor's predicament. In fact, I wish to dissociate myself from the general gloating, which strikes me as evidence that we have unleashed among us an ugliness far worse than anything the tribunals are likely to expose.
In predicting that no one would do time, I was commenting on the nature of power in this State during my lifetime. In the past, I would have been unlikely to lose money on such a prediction, because it was a racing certainty that the tight nexus of powerful people which operates this society would have continued to protect its own. On this basis, a superficial reading of events might prompt me to celebrate Mr Lawlor's downfall, on the view that the rule of law had been restored to its proper owners, the citizens of Ireland. If this was a movie, this is where James Stewart or Paul Newman might get to his feet and say something about justice being done though the heavens fall.
But I do not believe the law has been handed over to its proper owners. All that has occurred is a wholesale substitution of the usurpers. There is a new set of illicit custodians in the citadel and their identities are as opaque and their intentions as suspect as those they have unseated. What my colleague was saying on the radio was this: "After many decades of banging on the gates, we have gained control of the castle."
The old power structures centred mainly on political patronage and the repayment of favours. Those with power were essentially the politicians who acquired it at the polls and those they appointed to it. All this is changed. Political power remains crucial, but those who obtain it are no longer in control, being mere agents of a wider cultural orchestration operating on the basis of an assumed right to rule.
In a sense, those who rule do so less on behalf of anybody than on behalf of a set of ideas which, to qualify personally for immunity from attack, they must continue to support. These ideas are fundamentally concerned with creating a society in which "right thinking" shall flourish and its enemies perish. In this orchestration, the public is but a bit player, walking on occasionally to jeer or throw coins at the accused.
This is not a crusade for truth and justice, but a war in which truth and justice are weapons to be used. Nor has it anything to do with returning the instruments of power to the people. On the contrary, the long recent war of attrition against Fianna Fail has been pursued to ensure that the people are denied the opportunity of electing the "wrong" people.
I do not suggest that wrongs should go unpunished. My point is that if this was genuinely about restoring the rule of law to the people, the crusade to put the State straight would not be confined to beef and buildings.
Last Monday, the day Liam Lawlor was sentenced, I wrote on this page about the family courts. What I suggested was quite staggering: that some applicants to such courts get to write court orders according to their own requirements. I challenged the Chief Justice to explain this. If what I wrote was untrue, one might have expected an instant rebuttal from within the legal system.
If it was true, then it represents something much worse than anything in which Liam Lawlor has been implicated. It would mean that there has been widespread violation of men and their children in the most intimate areas of their lives, that many citizens have been systematically deprived of justice in the pursuit of greed and vengeance. It is possible that, in his sojourn in Mountjoy, Liam Lawlor will meet men who are there because of breaking court orders that no judge ever issued.
And yet, not one newspaper or other media outlet has devoted the slightest energy to ascertaining the truth or otherwise of these allegations. I received not one inquiry from any of the radio and television programmes which frequently suggest themselves as being instruments of addressing wrongs in this society. The Chief Justice kept his counsel. If those who wrote coruscating attacks on Liam Lawlor for the past week sincerely believed in one word of their own fulminations, this would be front-page news. The only possible conclusion is that they don't really care about truth and justice at all.
Abuses and injustice are of interest to those who now run this society only when they implicate those whom the new elite requires to be swept away. Mr Justice Smyth was wrong when he said that there are no untouchables. The new untouchables, like the old untouchables, are those who remain in harmony with the prevailing ideologies.
jwaters@irish-times.ie